Airships!

Check out this spectacular vision of downtown Troy in 2016 -- as imagined in 1916. It's like Fritz Lang meets Jules Verne. Here's an uncropped, large format version.

The image is from a program for a vaudeville show that played at the old Proctor's in Troy a century ago. We came across it when Emily Zimmerman shared it on Instagram last week. The people at the Rensselaer County Historical Society were nice enough to pull out a high-resolution version of the image and send it to us.

As RCHS executive director Ilene Frank mentioned to us in an email: "I don't know specifically what prompted this vision, but it is definitely in the time period of major Expos and World Fairs that promoted a technologically advanced and modern view of future society."

And a Troy on a whole different scale.