To the Editor:

In my lifetime alone, I’ve seen six historic buildings intentionally demolished in Altamont.

First, when I was 4, the 1785 Wayside Inn built by our first settler family, the Seversons, was torn down to erect a gas station. Progress, right?

But guess what: Just 23 years later, what was sitting in its place was an abandoned Exxon station.  We traded almost 200 years of history for 23 years of  “progress” from one of our friendly fossil-fuel conglomerates.

Five years later, in 1961, soon after I had smoked my first (and only) cigarette in the abandoned ruins of the 1885 Alanson Dietz soda and bottling factory on Maple Avenue, now occupied by Schilling Park, that building too was wiped away.

An even greater crime came in 1972 when the beautiful Victorian Mynderse home on the corner of Main and Park was torn down to make extra room around that flat rectangular bank building  of ours that’s been sitting vacant across from the park for going on five years.

Courtesy of KeyBank, we lost two historic buildings in one fell swoop, because the classic 1911 brick First National Bank had to be torn down too. We still miss it.

Most recently, as we all know so well, the historic Dr. Frederick Crounse house (built before 1854) was allowed by the municipalities of Altamont and Guilderland to disintegrate despite grant money that could have saved it.

Then came Stewart’s demolition of 107-109 Helderberg Avenue, another sturdy, well built and perfectly serviceable duplex dating back to 1900. What’s next?

The old train station, just 50 yards south of the Altamont Free Library, with rain and ice and snow invading through holes in its roof — and just four years ago there was talk of restoring it; maybe the current owner is still considering taking on that heroic task.

What if AI could bring these historic buildings back, would we do it? Think about it: gene editing and genetic rescue are promising to bring back lost species, so why not lost buildings?

After all, we do have photographs of all the buildings mentioned above, and probably even genetic codes (blueprints) for some of them!

Would we bring them back if we could? I sure would!

So I turned to my cousin and former long-time Maple Avenue resident, Louis Hall Sr., who has an AI photography studio on Martha’s Vineyard and asked him to help me retrieve from oblivion another lost building: the first Lutheran Church in our area (1787, rebuilt in 1806), the historic St. James Lutheran Evangelical Church, which once stood at the entrance of Fairview Cemetery.

Lou said, sure, just give me a photo. I said, there aren’t any. No one has ever seen it. There is no known image of it, artistic or photographic.

He said, well, I’ll see what I can do! And then, using Photoshop Beta's Generative AI, Adobe Lightroom, and Topaz Lab's AI-powered photo upscaling software, Lou brought it back to life!

Well, back to a hypothetical version of its life, as an important historic and spiritual landmark from the earliest days of the old Plank Road, 200 years before anybody ever thought of plunking a Dunkin’ alongside it.

You can see his work at the next Guilderland Historical Society meeting on Thursday, Nov. 21, at 2 p.m., at the Guilderland Public Library.

When we save historic buildings, our community thrives: The Altamont Free Library is the best example, a gem that was actually saved!

And it’s not the only success story. The house where we collected chestnuts (154 Main) was in such a terrible condition in the 1960s that we called it the spook house, but look at it now: a perfectly restored classic Italianate home so typical of our 1890s village.

Also in the 1960s, the 1879 house that stood in the current St. Lucy’s parking lot was moved — yes, moved, on a flatbed — and it’s now 251 Brandle, beautifully maintained and landscaped, adding its comforting sounds of children at play and healthy neighborhood activity

 Let’s give AI a chance to bring back — or at least, to inspire us to bring back — our history, and the sense of community and continuity that our historic buildings provide — if we don’t tear them down first.

Tom Capuano

Altamont