MVLS I Spy Oral History Interview

Abraham Glen House, Scotia, NY
Part 2: Audio Excerpts | Current Photo | Historic Picture

Transcript of audio excerpts

Interviewers: Carter Sullivan & Megan Purtell
Speaker: Richard Sullivan

My name is Megan Purtell. I'm in Scotia-Glenville High School, 9th grade.

My name is Carter Sullivan. I'm in Lincoln Elementary, in 5th grade.

And I'm Dick Sullivan, the object of this interview. I'm gonna talk about the old Ritz Theater in Scotia and also the Scotia Library and the area around the library that is in the Village of Scotia.

SCOTIA LIBRARY

D. Sullivan: I always looked upon the library as kind of the center of the whole Collins Park arena. The library was run at that time by Mrs. O'Brian whose husband and son lived with her in I believe the apartment right above the library at the time. Next to the library were two Village barns - they were on sort of the (I think probably) the north side of the building. Between the two barns was another building called the Retreat House which was a one story affair, it had a kind of a Southern type Mexican California roof . . . but it was mostly used in the summer, stored athletic equipment and games for the kids, and the Village would hire somebody to come and supervise the kids to make sure everything worked reasonably well. Near, a little further north was the old sleighing hill - that sleighing hill went from the very top of the park down to the bottom of the park. It's not there any longer, in the place that it was.

The river used to back up in the springtime into the large area at the lowest level next to the lake in the park, and it would bring with it huge chunks of ice. .

Also, back then, there were at different times, ice skating rinks around the park area. One of them was the lake itself, Collins Lake itself. But that was somewhat dangerous. There were springs around Collins Lake, and some of those springs brought up warm water from the bottom, even in the winter, it kept some areas of the lake unfrozen or the ice was very thin. Another ice skating rink was right near the lake - my recollections, somebody had in mind digging a big swimming pool for the community, it never got very far - but at least it wasn't so deep that it was dangerous.

Another skating rink that existed next to the library, down the hill from the library itself, let's see, what would have been the east side of the library, I think, at least the side toward Schenectady - that was right on the ground and the water was poured on by the firemen, I think. The other thing I recall that always struck me as very interesting about that park is there was a big huge baseball grandstand there - it had a roof, it had chicken wire in front of it so that if a baseball came flying at you, you wouldn't get hit, and there were big restrooms in the basement, not in the basement, really - under the grandstand, and these restrooms were really nothing more than outhouses.

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