Troy has more than its share of beautiful buildings, gracious streets and memorable urban landscapes.

But the image that graces the city's official website, letterhead and business cards?

That's a photo of Boston.

The photograph has been used by Troy since its current website design was developed in 2003. The image stretches across the top of the page and shows a street of tightly squeezed houses, with undulating bay windows and a flowering magnolia tree.

The city began using the photo more broadly in 2004, when Mayor Harry Tutunjian took office. Tutunjian on Wednesday said he liked the photo, so decided to have it placed on city letterhead and elsewhere.

The image also is used on the website for the city's visitor information center.

Indeed, use of the image is now so widespread that it has nearly become an iconic shot of the city.

"We never questioned where it was from," Tutunjian said.

The photo looks as though it could be Second Street or one of the other historic and well-preserved avenues that runs south of downtown and through the Washington Park neighborhood.

But Troy is brimming with architecture buffs.

And to some, the image just never rang true.

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"I knew it wasn't Troy," said Peter Shaver, a city resident and analyst with the state Historic Preservation Office. "There's not a single recognizable building."

Questions about the authenticity of the photo eventually came to the Times Union. A blog on the newspaper's website then asked readers whether they thought the photo was really Troy.

That led one person to send a link to the original photograph -- a shot identified by Getty Images as Commonwealth Avenue, a grand Boston boulevard.

A look at the full version of the image, rather than the cropped version on city letterhead, makes it clear why Shaver and others were suspicious. The buildings are too high and big-city to be Troy.

Boston-based photographer Steve Dunwell recognized the photo immediately when directed to the Troy website.

"That's my picture," said Dunwell, who estimated the photo was taken in 1990.

Dunwell was surprised to see his photo used as an image of Troy, but noted the Internet age makes it easy for a photographer's work to be widely misused. He also wondered if Troy ever paid Getty Images to use the image.

A phone call to L&P Media, the Troy public relations company that originally developed the website, was not returned.

Tom Carroll, who oversaw the now-shuttered Troy visitors center and its related Internet page, said he was asked to use the photo on the website by the administration of former Mayor Mark Pattison.

The administration wanted consistency between the official city page and the visitor center presentation. It's been up on the center's site ever since.

"I just assumed it was someplace like Second Street," Carroll said. "I really never gave it a moment's thought."

Carroll is president of the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway, a preservation group in South Troy. So he's well aware that Troy doesn't need to steal from other cities for shots of lovely streetscapes.

"You can take shots like that in Troy until the cows come home," Carroll said. "There's plenty of beautiful architecture in Troy."

Movie crews have agreed. In the 1980s, for example, a film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve shot on Troy streets, using the city as a stand-in for a bigger metropolis to the east.

The name of that film? "The Bostonians."

Reach Churchill at 454-5442 or cchurchill@timesunion.com. Kenneth C. Crowe II contributed to this story.