First Fridays February - October 5:30-7pm
Van Ostrande-Radliff House
48 Hudson Avenue Albany NY 12207
There is no charge to visit! We do ask that you register if you are coming!
Guided tours at 5:30-6-6:30
Explore Albany's oldest building on your own or take a short guided tour with HAF's Director of Preservation Services, Cara Macri, highlighting the House's nearly 300 years of history and the restoration process.
When the settlement that became the capital city of New York was originally developed, Albany was a small bustling trading village. Its streets were full of little brick and wooden houses that looked just like the Van Ostrande-Radliff House. As one of the oldest settlements in the United State, dating back to 1624, Albany is to be celebrated as part of our country's earliest history.
The Van Ostrande-Radliff is documented to be the oldest building remaining in the city and has been witness to nearly 300 years of American history. It heard Benjamin Franklin present the Albany Plan of Union, one of our nation's first baby steps, just around the corner. It's first two families played a role in the American Revolution. The youngest Ostrander sons born in the house and Johannes Radliff, owner during the Revolution, fought in the local militia including at the Battle of Ticonderoga. It met John Wilkes Booth when he performed at the New Gaiety across the street in 1861. (Abraham Lincoln was also in town coincidentally) It listened to the 1912 World Series radio broadcast with hundreds of Albanians gathered next to it in Liberty Park.
The house's development follow's Albany's growth starting as a little Dutch house on the edge of town, to becoming a booming leather goods business with the construction of the Erie Canal. As the Industrial Revolution took off, the building became a knit neck tie and underpant factory with Stoneman knit neckties being shipped across the globe. In the 1930s, Saul's Equipment opened selling millions of pots, canners, roasting pans, and dishes to Albanians until 1996 when the building fell vacant. Since the 1940s, the building watched its neighbors be demolished for urban renewal and parking lots with the increase of cars into Downtown. By 2016, it was the last building left in a nearly 7 acre sea of parking lots.
Beginning in 2020, the Van Ostrande-Radliff House and all it's additions underwent a full restoration and rehabilitation, peeling back layers and bringing the building up to current building codes so that it can once again. Starting in Spring 2026, Historic Albany will host workshops, lectures and tours in the building monthly. It will also house a satellite of the Architectural Parts Warehouse as a retail shop for all sorts of historic house parts and Albany architecture and history themed merchandise.
Tours of the Van Ostrande-Radliff House are made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.