Amsterdam sparkled in 1925 expo
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 07-23-16
America was prospering in 1925 and local businesses staged Amsterdam’s Progress Exposition and Auto Show that year to show off that prosperity.
“In the twenties, that was the heyday here,” said anthropologist Susan Dauria. “The population was about 35,000, the biggest it’s ever been.” Dauria wrote her doctoral dissertation on the rise and decline of manufacturing in Amsterdam.
The Progress Exposition was organized by the Board of Trade, predecessor of the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce. The event was held for eight days in September at Ross’s Flats in the East End, next to the railroad tracks. Admission was 25 cents for adults and 10 cents for children.
A windmill was erected as the entrance to a series of large tents that contained more than a hundred booths where manufacturers and businessmen showed their wares. One “mammoth tent” was dedicated to the display of automobiles. Socony (Standard Oil of New York) showed off a gasoline pump.
The carpet mills—Mohawk and Stephen Sanford & Sons--had booths in the Exposition, as did other manufacturers.
A Main Street parade preceded opening night. The Schenectady Gazette reported: “All the industrial concerns and stores in this city have been invited to have their old employees in point of service participate in the parade, as the parade will feature those who have had part in the building up of Amsterdam.”
Schenectady General Electric furnished floodlights. State Senator William T. Byrne of Albany gave a speech. There was a fashion show, baby contest and a pet show. A billboard advertised music and entertainment daily.
Main Street merchant Holzheimer & Shaul occupied several booths that looked like store window displays. A cardboard cutout of a young girl was behind a new Hoover vacuum cleaner, offered with “unusually easy terms.” A female mannequin wearing an apron was placed amid a display of Glenwood gas and wood stoves.
One of the firm’s principals, P. Dater Shaul, was pictured at a planning session for the Exposition. To tout the city’s role in making rugs, Holzheimer’s put a Sanford carpet on the sidewalk in front of its East Main Street store during the Exposition.
In Amsterdam since 1882, Fitzgerald’s Bottling Works offered ginger ale for five cents a bottle at the Exposition. “The safest drinks--kills disease germs,” stated an advertising poster.
The Walter Elwood Museum in Amsterdam has a book of pictures of the Progress Exposition taken by photographer Emil Zillgitt for the Board of Trade.
One picture shows the booth of real estate agent Monroe Gray who was selling suburban lots at Tribes Hill Heights, west of Amsterdam. “A lot means a home and a home means a lot,” stated a poster. Gray was seated, smartly dressed in a three-piece suit with well-shined shoes, holding a rolled up blueprint.
Another poster promised, “Invest now and double your money at Tribes Hill Heights.” Gray had blueprints of the lots and pictures of homes stacked on a table underneath an American flag.
Photographer Zillgitt was born in Germany in 1883 and came to America when he was five years old. He worked for photographer Fred Morse and bought Morse’s business in 1922. Zillgitt’s studio was at 35 East Main Street.
Amsterdam native Peter Betz said, “I have a picture of myself in a sailor suit taken at home by Zillgitt sometime around 1944. I was about two years old and vaguely remember the gent because he was a very humorous man who knew how to get a nervous kid to sit for him.”
Zillgitt and his wife Eunice lived on Locust Avenue. He died in 1952. She died in 1970.
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