Albany

Albany, as locals know, is a government center, college town, collection of neighborhoods and, perhaps, national capital of political corruption.

It is also, quietly, a city of murals.

I became a little obsessed with Albany's murals in recent days. I spent hours traveling streets and alleys hoping to spot new ones, before Tuesday's blizzard finally forced me to stop. I'm in withdrawal.

I counted 27 murals, which seems like a lot for a smallish city, and I'm sure I missed quite a few.

My count doesn't include the city's many indoor murals — and so it misses, for example, the 14 paintings by David Lithgow in the old Milne School on the downtown UAlbany campus.

My count also mostly ignores the many murals intended as advertisements for businesses — but there are worthy exceptions, murals that cross the line from advertising to art. An example is the underwater submarine that morphs into a sub sandwich on the side of the Maple Leaf Market and Deli on Ontario Street.

Nor did I include temporary murals, such as the impressive one by Rachel Baxter that beautifies a wooden fence around a building being renovated at South Pearl Street and Maiden Lane.

But, of course, most outdoor murals are impermanent by nature.

Happen to remember the big painting of a dead squirrel on Sheridan Avenue? Never popular with some Sheridan Hollow residents, it disappeared, sadly, as the neighborhood was being remade by Habitat for Humanity.

Other murals just fade away.

You can still see the faded remnants of a detailed depiction of the history of plumbers and plumbing on another Ontario Street building, but just barely. Painted as part of a public mural program of the 1970s and early 1980s, it marks the former home of the Albany Licensed Plumbers Association.

Some murals have been kept fresh.

The big rose painted decades ago on the side of an office building in the warehouse district was repainted in 2015. Likewise, residents in Pine Hills gathered in 2008 to refresh the mural at the corner of South Main and Madison. The 40-year-old painting is an homage to bygone businesses, including Clapp's Bookstore and Mack Drug.

It is one of the better known Albany murals, as is the massive depiction of bluebirds painted last year on a downtown parking garage. Painted alongside a highway exit, it is hard to miss.

Many more of the city's murals are well hidden, noticeable only if you're lucky enough to stumble upon them.

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Next time you're in the warehouse district, check out the colorful mural on Common Place, which is little more than an ally behind Learned Street. The hidden gem done by the artist Doodles in 2011 defies easy description or explanation.

Murals are most common in the city's grittier neighborhoods. Often they face garbage-strewn vacant lots or are partially obscured by parked cars — but humble sites can display ambitious art.

In an alley between a Central Avenue comic-book store and an automotive repair shop is an 85-foot mural of an exodus of animals and creatures by Phlegm, an internationally known British street artist.

My favorite mural is also in an unlikely spot — the reclining girl painted on a Second Avenue building in the South End, her oversized feet stretching out along the sidewalk, her elongated fingers wrapped beneath her knee. One of several murals painted in 2011 as part of the Living Walls project, it surprises me whenever I drive by.

But murals are supposed to surprise, and the murals that pepper Albany's neighborhoods reveal a perhaps unexpected side of the city. They belie claims of a dull government town. They show off the city's eclectic and offbeat side. They reveal its soul.

Public art turns the ordinary into the memorable, the dreary into the remarkable.

Not that all of Albany's murals are uplifting. Pass the large, angelic mural on North Swan Street, the one that asks "Why can't we unite and be at peace?" and you're likely reminded of the violence that plagues the neighborhood.

But does anyone look up at the Swan Street elk mural, the one designed to look as though the animal is eating greenery off nearby trees, and not feel a little bit better?

Albany has an impressive number and variety of murals, but there could be more. The city has no shortage of ugly walls.

Heck, Albany even has the ghastly old Central Warehouse, an eyesore just about begging for an artistic touch. Who has paint?

cchurchill@timesunion.com • 518-454-5442 • @chris_churchill