Troy

All the comments on Troy are accurate in some way. Troy was originally a bustling industrial city and when my mother was in her teens she would often take a bus over to Troy to go shopping. But after the factories started pulling out Troy when on a downhill slide from which it is just starting to recover. I attended RPI (in Troy) for 4 years and spend a lot time there now since most of my friends and my boyfriend chose to stay in Troy after graduating. The city has changed SO much. 5 years ago you couldn’t find a place to get a coffee, now there are numerous coffee shops and restaurants to stop in, along with some cute boutiques, a book store, the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall and numerous antique shops and art galleries. In fact, Troy is the oldest standing Victorian community in the world, with most of the architecture being the original turn of the century.

If you’re thinking of visiting I strongly suggest you come on the last Friday of the month, known as “Troy Night Out.” All the local shops and restaurants stay open late, as well as the art galleries. Or Checkout the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall for a concert. It has perfect acoustics and it used by Yo-Yo Ma to record.

My brother went to RPI and that basically would be the only reason I ever came through here.

We went to go meet my Grandfathers sister in the late 1980s when I was in my teens. She ended up in Troy after the Armenian genocide.

After walking through the desert from Istanbul to Baghdad both kids were sold into slavery to Arabs and separated. A while later my Grandfather helped a stranger passing through town by giving him food, the stranger asked his name, figured out he was Armenian, thanked him and moved on. A few towns away drinking in a bar, he told people of this nice boy and his name, my Grandfathers uncle heard his name, asked what town it was, gathered up the local law enforcement and rescued my family from the people that owned them. He went to Canada, and evetually Detroit. She wound up in Troy, NY.

I was a little disappointed. The downtown area looks like it was really nice at one time but many of the buildings are now empty. The surrounding neighborhood around downtown looked a little poor too. I heard it’s going through a revitalization. One bright spot we found: Brown’s Brewery close to the river.

When I moved to Troy in 1991, the downtown area was pretty awful – lots of closed-down shops, low land values, and generally not a pleasant place to be. But the last few years it’s been better and better. There was a real effort made to clean the place up, and a load of small businesses opened up, especially near the riverfront. There are a number of nice coffee shops, antique stores, local artisans selling their work, and the like. There’s a local arts center that offers excellent classes and sometimes takes part in arts festivals, and RPI has been doing a load of expansion. Sure, it still has its bad areas, but doesn’t anywhere?

Troy really went from being an area my friends and I used to mock, to being somewhere I’d happily stop for lunch and have a wander around, even if I’d never previously known the place. I look forward to being back next time I visit family there.