“The Buildings are Brick Generaly, very stately and high though not altogether like ours in Boston. The Bricks in some of the Houses are of divers Coullers and laid in Checkers, being glazed, look very agreable. The inside of them is neat to admiration; the wooden work, for only the walls are plaster’d, and the Sumers and Gist are planed and kept very white scour’d as so is all the partitions if made of Bords.” Albany long preserved its Dutch appearance and Dutch houses. Peter Kalm’s description of the city of Albany is a good one, and would well answer for other New York towns:-- “The houses in this town are very neat, and partly built with stones covered with shingles of the White Pine. Some are slated with tiles from Holland, because the clay of this neighborhood is not reckoned fit for tiles. Most of the houses are built in the old way, with the gable-end towards the street; the gable-end of brick and all the other walls of planks. The gutters on the roofs reach almost to the middle of the street. This preserves the walls from being damaged by the rain, but it is extremely disagreeable in rainy weather for the people in the streets, there being hardly any means of avoiding the water from the gutters. “The street doors are generally in the middle of the houses and on both sides are seats, on which, during fair weather the people spend almost the whole day, especially on those which are in the shadow of the houses. In the evening these seats are covered with people of both sexes, but this is rather troublesome, as those who pass by are obliged to greet everybody unless they will shock the politeness of the inhabitants of this town. The streets are broad and some of them are paved; in some parts they are lined with trees. The long streets are almost parallel to the river, and the others intersect them at right angles.” Rev. Samuel Chandler, chaplain of one of the Massachusetts regiments, stopped several days in Albany in the year 1755. He tells of the streets with rows of small button-trees, of the brick houses curiously flowered with black brick and dated with the same, the Governor’s house having “two black brick-hearts.” The houses one story high with their gable-ends “notched like steps” (he might have said with corbel-steps), were surmounted with vanes, the figures of horses, lions, geese, and sloops. There were window shutters with loop-holes outside the cellars. Smith, the historian of New York, writing at the same time, calls the houses of all the towns, “built of brick in Dutch taste.” Daniel Denton, writing as early as 1670, tells of the “red and black tile (of New York) giving at a distance a pleasing aspect to the Spectators.” All the old sketches of the town which exist, crude as they are, certainly do present a pleasing aspect.