On Friday morning, Ten Broeck Triangle was beautiful as ever. The spire of St. Joseph's Church soared toward a pale blue sky. Dappled sun fell on the neighborhood's elegant homes.

You would struggle to find a more lovely scene in the city. You could walk along and think, no wonder Mayor Kathy Sheehan and her husband, Bob, have decided to move here.

The fixer-upper they just purchased for $77,000 is not grand, but it looks out across First Street and St. Joseph's Park to the magnificent stone of the old church.

Who wouldn't want that view? The downtown neighborhood is an understandable choice — even if it breaks with recent mayoral history.

Strange thing about Albany: It is a dense and historic place with inner-city neighborhoods as distinctive as fingerprints, but for decades its mayors have often chosen to live in blander locales at its edges.

Erastus Corning lived in Bethlehem, if you can believe it. His successor, Thomas Whalen, chose a handsome but bucolic block of South Pine Street, near Manning Boulevard. Jerry Jennings lived for a time in a stylish building across from Washington Park, but he spent most of his 20-year tenure in a New Scotland Avenue house that's a few skips from the city line.

Sheehan lives out that way, too. Her Marsdale Avenue neighborhood, behind Maria College, is as suburban as an Applebee's. Its homes were built in the 1960s, mostly. The lawns are undisturbed by sidewalks. Trees outnumber people.

The census tract around Sheehan's current home is 90 percent white. Most residents have bachelor's degrees. Hardly anybody is poor.

Ten Broeck, on the eastern edge of Arbor Hill, near the Palace Theater, is a different place — materially and otherwise.

The Arbor Hill census tract that includes Ten Broeck is 80 percent black. Half of its children live below the poverty line. The median income is 25 percent lower than that of the overall city.

While Ten Broeck is better off than much of Arbor Hill, it isn't a stretch to say that the Sheehans are moving from one America to another. They are crossing an economic and social divide.

Good for them. This would be a better country if more of us had the courage to do the same — and if other factors, from taxes to schools to crime, didn't discourage doing so. It would be a better country if more of us lived outside our economic silos.

Unfortunately, because politics is politics and Albany is Albany, the Sheehans' move has generated some of the usual cynicism. There must be an ulterior motive, the skeptics say. What's the angle?

But not everything is political, even for a politician. Maybe the Sheehans just want to experience something new. Perhaps they want to walk to restaurants and theaters.

Is that so impossible to believe?

During the most recent Democratic mayoral primary, Carolyn McLaughlin was the only candidate with a sidewalk outside her door, and she has lamented that Albany is usually ruled from its edges. When I called to ask what she thought of the mayor's planned move, the former city council president was of two opinions.

On one hand, McLaughlin was a touch annoyed that the Sheehans' decision has received attention. There is nothing heroic or special about living downtown, she said. Thousands of people do so without fanfare.

"I've lived in the South End for years and nobody made a big deal about that," she said. "It's just what you do."

On the other hand, McLaughlin thought having a mayor living downtown would be good for Albany. Sheehan, she said, will better understand inner-city issues and problems, big and small. Her perspective may change.

"When you live there, you experience what the people in that neighborhood experience," McLaughlin said.

The Sheehans' move has symbolic value, too.

For decades, families with the ability to choose left urban centers, and government policy aided their flight. Inner cities seemed as unloved as snakes. That Albany's mayors also lived elsewhere illustrated the plight of the old neighborhoods.

The tide has changed. Cities have cachet. More people find suburbia unsatisfying and bland or would rather walk than drive. The Sheehans' choice is not that unusual.

But it would be foolish to think that Albany and most other cities can declare victory. The flow back to the city is still a trickle. The disinvestment of past decades did too much lasting damage.

The continued well-being of Ten Broeck is not assured. The ugly signs of abandonment start showing up a few doors west of the Sheehans' new home. The neighborhood's landmark church is vacant and decaying, and there is no plan for its rescue.

More Information Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518-454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com See More Collapse

Ten Broeck, then, is on the front line in the fight for Albany's future. The Sheehans have dug their trench.

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