Mount Ida and Pawling Avenue
The Eastside climbs from downtown up onto Mount Ida. Emma Willard School sits on top, on a 137-acre campus at Pawling and Elmgrove avenues. The school moved to Troy in 1821 as the Troy Female Seminary, and its campus went on the National Register in 1979.
Pawling Avenue, which carries NY 66, is lined with older houses. The Henry Koon House at 171 Pawling Avenue, a Greek Revival brick house from about 1830, is on the National Register. In 2024 HBO used an 1872 house on the avenue as a filming location for The Gilded Age, because the streetscape still looks the part.
The Housing
In the census tract around Pawling Avenue, Elmgrove Avenue and Whitman Court, about 76 percent of homes date from before 1940, and barely 2 percent from after 2000. It is a mix: about half are single-family detached houses and about 44 percent of units are in two-to-four-unit buildings. It also has one of the higher owner-occupancy rates in the city, a little over half. About 84 percent of homes heat mainly with gas.
Closer to Prospect Park and the Congress Street hill, the tract below the park leans toward multi-family, with about 71 percent of units in two-to-four-unit buildings and about two thirds of homes built by 1939.
Heating and Cooling Big Old Houses
Large Eastside houses bring their own problems. Three floors of plaster walls mean the top floor cooks in July and the first floor can run cold in January if the heat is unbalanced. Adding AC usually means ductless units, a small-duct system hidden in closets and the attic, or a separate system just for the upper floors, because tearing open plaster to run full-size ducts is rarely worth it.
On the heating side we see gas boilers feeding radiators, furnaces that replaced older systems, and newer heat pumps added for cooling that also carry the mild months. Owners weighing an aging boiler against a heat pump can look at National Grid's upstate heat pump program information, which includes air-to-water heat pumps for homes with hot water boilers.
Eastside heating or cooling? Call us.
Call (838) 884-0024Parks and Streets
Prospect Park covers about 80 acres on top of Mount Ida, designed in 1903 by Garnet Douglass Baltimore, RPI's first African American graduate. Below it, the Poesten Kill drops through a gorge in a series of falls, with the park parking on Linden Avenue. We work on Pawling Avenue, Elmgrove Avenue, Spring Avenue, Pinewoods Avenue, Whitman Court, Maple Avenue, Belle Avenue, Lakewood Place and Linden Avenue, and around Ida Lake and Old Mount Ida Cemetery.
Eastside Questions
Can the top floor of a three-story house be cooled without cooling the whole house?
Yes. A ductless unit or a small separate system for the top floor is common. It lets the floor that overheats get its own thermostat instead of overcooling the rooms below.
How do you add AC to a plaster-wall house without tearing it apart?
Ductless wall units need only a small hole for the line set. Small-duct systems use flexible tubing that fits through closets and floor framing. Both avoid opening up most of the plaster.
Should I replace an old gas boiler with another boiler or a heat pump?
Both can work. A new high-efficiency boiler keeps your radiators and is a like-for-like swap. An air-to-water heat pump can also feed radiators, though older radiators sized for hot boiler water may need a check. We look at the house and the radiators before recommending either.