The Pastures Historic District is a residential neighborhood located south of downtown Albany, New York, United States.

It was originally an area set aside as communal pasture by Albany's city council in the late 17th century and deeded to the Dutch Reformed Church.

As the city began to grow following its designation as New York's state capital a century later, it was subdivided into building lots, some of which were developed with small rowhouses.

One of Albany's busiest neighborhoods in the 19th century, the area fell into decline during the third quarter of the 20th as citizens left the city for the suburbs.

The actual boundary was not clarified by the city and state until 12 years after the district was listed, and does not follow those streets completely, excluding some more modern properties and areas where demolitions took place.

The Dutch colonists who founded what became Albany in the mid-17th century set aside this land, outside the city's stockade, as common pasture.

[4] After the Revolutionary War and independence, the city urged the church to subdivide the land into building-sized lots and sell them for development.

The nearby house at 96 Madison, built three years later, was considered the most elegant private home in the city at that time.

Four of the six houses on the row next to it at 82–94 Madison, built after another three years, in 1814, were owned by Union College founder Dudley Walsh.

Middle-class citizens continued settling there, joined by carpenters and builders who bought several lots at once, put up a row, lived in one unit and rented out the others.

The houses they built, many of which survive on South Ferry between Franklin and Green, introduced the third story, gabled roof and dormer windows to the neighborhood.

Older houses also saw their facades updated with timely decorations like bracketed cornices, metal lintels and ornate friezes.

The Gothic Revival stone towers of St. John's, at 140 Green Street, began looming over the district in 1903, along with its neighboring school.

The construction of Empire State Plaza during the 1960s displaced more residents, and the city's central areas, including the Pastures began showing signs of urban decay.

[2] Late in the decade, the city's new Historic Resources Commission designated the area the Pastures Preservation District and got it listed on the Register in 1972.

The Democratic political machine of Daniel P. O'Connell mostly eschewed the federal Title I funds for the massive urban renewal programs of the era, since they wanted to retain control of patronage.

They moved residents out, temporarily they hoped, while selected decrepit buildings were demolished and new ones built in sympathetic styles.

Individuals who approached with plans to buy and restore one or two houses at a time, and live there when finished, were turned away while the buildings remained empty and decayed further, some of them succumbing to arson, including the school.

"The real place ceased to exist when its last resident was trundled off to a distant housing project", urbanist Roberta Brandes Gratz wrote a quarter-century later.

Some of the buildings have, she notes, been incorrectly restored and "the area looks more like a sanitized suburban enclave ... than an urban neighborhood".

He and his co-conspirators made it appear that they had the capital to borrow from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to buy the properties.