A rendering by artist Len Tantillo of his plan to build a canal through downtown Albany.

Downtown Albany has gotten downright tattered and scruffy. It’s also become somewhat exciting. People have been seen defecating in the streets and the sound of gunfire is not unknown to casual diners of restaurants. The wild west.

It’s not a secret. Even our governor has seen it and been moved to save the city and help bring back its vibrancy and peaceful calm by throwing lots of state money in a tired city’s general direction.

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I think I’ve seen this movie before.

More than a half century ago, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller was embarrassed by similar squalor when he was driving Dutch royalty around town and delivered in spades what can be charitably described as a dreadful Germanic overreaction, the Empire State Plaza. Ninety-eight teeming-with-humanity acres of the city razed, not a twig standing. I took pictures of it. It was astounding. Not a sound of all that life there just weeks before.

Between the censuses of 1960 and 1970, the city lost 20,000, mostly to Rocky’s head trip. In fundamental ways, Albany has never fully recovered from that evisceration.

Yet here we are, a generation and a half later, with the same dilemma. A forlorn........

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