O Albany! O Spitzer!

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Reporters setting up this week at the state Capitol in Albany, N.Y. (Photo credit: Mary Altaffer/Associated Press)

Albany is at the top of national headlines now, and some pundits are talking about resigned New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s behavior and political corruption in Albany as if these are recent phenomena. Oh really? Here’s what William Kennedy wrote about the city and its political environment years ago in his 1983 nonfiction book “O Albany!”:

“Maligning Albany is a very old game. The early Dutchmen were targets of derision by visitors who found their city dismal, dingy and dirty. The English didn’t do much better with it. About 1876 the famed architect Stanford White had this to say: ‘Misery, wretchedness, ennui and the devil — I’ve got to spend another evening in Albany. Of all the miserable, wretched, second-class, one-horse towns, this is the most miserable.’

“In modern times the city grew to be a lascivious parlor of Satan, and also what John Gunther in his ‘Inside U.S.A.’ in 1947 described as ‘a kind of political cloaca maxima, beside which Kansas City seemed almost pure.’ ”

Kennedy goes on to call the city “a famed vortex of state politics” and “a pinnacle of porkhead bossism” — and then spends the rest of his book describing all the things he loves about that city, the parade of characters who have fed his novels.

Spitzer may be the figure of ridicule now, but I prefer thinking of other names associated with Albany and with Kennedy—a worthy list that includes, real and imaginary, the Gatsbyish gangster Legs Diamond, the heroic searcher Daniel Quinn and Dan O’Connell, the very real, powerful Irish political boss who inspired Kennedy’s imagination.

Nick Owchar