Albany Audio Tours

Albany is the oldest continuously chartered city in the United States, founded as Fort Nassau by the Dutch in 1614 and chartered as a city in 1686. It sits on the west bank of the Hudson River at the point where the Mohawk River joins from the west, which made it the gateway to the interior of the continent for three centuries of traders, settlers, and politicians. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, passed through here on its way to Buffalo and transformed the city into a clearinghouse for the commerce of the whole Great Lakes region.

The Empire State Plaza, commissioned by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s and completed over a decade of construction, dominates the modern center of Albany like a Roman forum imagined by a modernist architect.

The plaza's reflecting pool, the Corning Tower (the tallest building in New York outside Manhattan), and the egg-shaped Egg Performing Arts Center all sit on a platform above the older city. Just to the north, Albany's 19th-century townhouse neighborhoods, particularly the Washington Park area, give a much quieter sense of what a prosperous Victorian river city looked like.