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That’s the question James Chaney asked himself when he discovered the box of sketches and paintings in the basement of the South End house he is rehabilitating.
Many of you know the answer. Rosen, who died in 2011, was a famous artist and longtime Times Union political cartoonist, a man known to confuse the powerful with designs that exposed corruption and emphasis.
Chaney hadn’t heard from him, although he and Rosen had something in common. Rosen, the son of an immigrant scrap paper merchant, had grown up in the house at 15 Catherine Street, across from the Schuyler Mansion. Chaney too, intermittently.
In fact, Rosen and her siblings had sold the house to Chaney’s father in 1969, as the growing black population of the South End moved west. Chaney’s father, Archie Johnson, was a food service employee at Stratton VA Medical Center and walked to work.
Fast forward to 2017, when Chaney, 50, took possession of a vacant house that had fallen into disrepair as his father got older and, after paying the back taxes, decided to begin the process. slow, painful and arduous to make it habitable again.
The work continues, and it has not been easy. Chaney, a teacher’s assistant at Montessori Magnet School in Albany, doesn’t have a bunch of spare money lying around. Banks, he said, were unwilling to lend money. And Chaney, who suffered a spinal injury in a car crash as a child, can’t do much of the work himself.
So, Chaney got an additional job as an Uber driver and funded the work on the house as best he could, he said. He asked for help with a GoFundMe page. He started combing Craigslist for aftermarket materials. He enlisted friends and family to help him out when they could.
During this time, he became increasingly fascinated with Rosen’s life and career, after finding this box of sketches and paintings and other items belonging to the famous designer, including his old high school yearbook, his notebooks and personal correspondence. The box launched a journey of discovery. (If you ride in Chaney’s Uber, you might be told, with considerable enthusiasm, all about Rosen.)
“It was like Hyman was sitting next to me and starting to draw,†Chaney said of finding the box. “It was like a time capsule. It was beautiful.”
On Friday morning, Chaney and I sat in front of the house and he showed me what he had found.
There were sketches of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, when Rosen, born 1923, was a teenager. There were unsigned paintings and notepads filled with scribbles and unsigned paintings. There were the first political cartoons, mostly depicting disturbing developments in Europe, and surprisingly provocative nudes.
“No more flesh,” Chaney said, handing me a charcoal sketch.
Chaney’s house was built in 1870 on land that was once part of the Schuyler family estate. In fact, the building and the two adjoining adjoining houses are easily seen from the grounds and windows of a mansion which has become much more of a tourist attraction since the smash hit of the musical “Hamilton” featuring Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.
“The entire area around the mansion is to be viewed as a critical historical and tourist resource for the city,†wrote Peter Lacovara, consulting curator at the Albany Institute of History and Art, as part of a series from the historic Albany Foundation on the endangered buildings of Albany.
“One of the historic places in Albany that I think has unfortunately been overlooked is this row of federal houses across from the Schuyler Mansion,” Lacovara also wrote of the houses at 13, 15 and 17 Catherine Street. “They represent a historic streetscape which should be preserved and developed.”
I spoke to Ed Rosen, one of Hy Rosen’s children, on Friday. He was interested in what Chaney had found, of course, and said he remembered the house when he visited as a child. The Delmar resident recalled family dinners in the house and watching the neon light of the the emblematic sign of the city’s Pegasus flashing from a second story rear window.
Chaney doesn’t remember the sign from his own childhood – it was taken off in 1962, almost a decade before he was born – but he does recall a South End that was much more alive and vital than it ever was. is now.
He wants his piece of rue Catherine to participate in the revitalization and rebirth of the neighborhood. Now living in Arbor Hill, he looks forward to the day when at least the basement of the house will be wheelchair accessible. He is ready to return to the house that housed his father.
And Hy Rosen too.
[email protected] â– 518-454-5442 â– @chris_churchill
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