Stand on the bank where the Mohawk pours over the Cohoes Falls, the largest cataract east of Niagara, and you are looking at the engine that built a city of red brick and spindles. A century ago, among the Irish, the French Canadians and the English overseers who tended those looms, came families from a poor province of the Austro-Hungarian empire called Galicia. They carried wooden trunks, an Eastern rite faith, and a stubborn idea of home. The Ukrainians in Cohoes, New York are the quiet inheritors of that arrival, still gathered around a golden dome on Ontario Street.
The Place
Cohoes sits at the northern edge of Albany County, on the islands and flats where the Mohawk River meets the Hudson. For most of the nineteenth century it was known as the Spindle City, a nickname earned honestly: by 1870 the town ran more than two hundred thousand spindles across its cotton and knitting mills.
The water did the work. The Cohoes Falls and a network of power canals turned a farming village into one of the great textile centres of the United States. At the heart of it stood Harmony Mills, which when its largest building opened in 1872 was the biggest cotton mill complex in the world.
Today Cohoes is a city of roughly eighteen thousand people, its mills converted to flats. It is a working town with a long memory, and tucked into that memory is a Ukrainian story most visitors never notice.
How It Became Ukrainian
The mills made the city, and the mills called the immigrants. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the looms of Cohoes had run through one wave of labour after another, and each wave came from somewhere poorer than the last.
The pull of the looms
The earliest mill hands at Harmony Mills were young, unmarried Irish women. By 1880 a large influx of French Canadians had broken the Irish hold on the workforce, while the skilled overseers were often Englishmen who had fled the textile towns of Lancashire. Into this layered industrial society, around the turn of the twentieth century, came Eastern Europeans.
Among them were Ruthenians, the people who would later be known as Ukrainians. They came from Galicia, the impoverished crownland of the Austro-Hungarian empire that today spans western Ukraine and south-eastern Poland. The same desperate province sent shiploads of its sons and daughters to the coal patches of Pennsylvania, the tenements of Manhattan’s East Village, and the mill towns of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys.
A church before a parish hall
What a Galician immigrant wanted, almost before anything else, was a church of his own rite. The Latin Catholic parishes of the Capital Region celebrated a Mass these newcomers could not follow, in a language and ritual that was not theirs.
The first solution was shared. In 1897 a frame meetinghouse in South Troy became the first Ukrainian Catholic church in the area, and the growing congregation soon outgrew it. When the community incorporated in 1900 to build something larger, it chose Watervliet for its central location, a point roughly equidistant between the Ukrainians of Watervliet, Cohoes and South Troy.
That church, St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, rose at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street in Watervliet between 1906 and 1908. Designed by the German-born architect Bernhardt Noack, it carried onion-domed towers and round-arched windows, a transplanted silhouette of the Carpathian foothills set down in buff-coloured American brick. The Panic of 1907 nearly stopped the work, and the parish had to turn to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Albany for a loan before the doors could open.
Cohoes builds its own
The Cohoes Ukrainians, for their part, had already decided they wanted a parish on their own side of the river. In 1906 a committee led by a parishioner named Lucas Jadlos formed to build a new church in the city itself.
The plans, drawn by an architect recorded as W. U. Noak, were accepted in February 1907, with a budget of thirteen thousand dollars for the whole project. The building went up in the autumn of 1907, and the first liturgy was celebrated at the beginning of 1908. It was named the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, and it gave the Ukrainians of Cohoes a permanent address.
From that point the community had the two institutions an immigrant parish needed: a church for the soul and, in time, a club for everything else. The golden dome on Ontario Street and the social hall down by the river would carry the Ukrainians of Cohoes through the twentieth century, through two world wars and the silencing of the homeland, and into a present that still surprises visitors who think of the Capital Region as merely Irish and Italian.
Faith with a longer reach
Cohoes also held, and still holds, an Orthodox congregation with roots in the same mountains. St. Nicholas Orthodox Church on Saratoga Street traces its families to Lemkovyna, the Lemko homeland now divided among Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia. Its parishioners are Carpatho-Rusyn rather than strictly Ukrainian, a reminder that the Eastern Christian map of this small city was never drawn in a single colour.
For the Ukrainian Catholics of Sts. Peter and Paul, identity was clearer and, in the twentieth century, sharper. The famine engineered under Stalin and the long Soviet occupation gave the diaspora a sense of guardianship. Cohoes became one of hundreds of small American towns where Ukrainian memory was kept alive precisely because it could not be kept alive at home.
The Landmarks
Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, 198 Ontario Street. The heart of Ukrainian Cohoes, built in 1907 and first opened for worship in early 1908. Its modest exterior is crowned by a large golden dome and cross. Inside, a screen of icons divides the sanctuary from the nave, and the parish has continued to invest in it across the generations, adding Byzantine chandeliers from Greece in 1999 and a hand-carved, hand-painted iconostasis made in Athens in 2002.
St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, Fourth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, Watervliet. The mother church of the area’s Ukrainian Catholics, built between 1906 and 1908 to serve Watervliet, Cohoes and South Troy together. Its onion domes and round-arched windows earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places on 15 April 2004. Generations of Cohoes families were baptised, married and buried from its altar before and after their own parish was complete.
Ukrainian-American Citizens Club, 1 Pulaski Street. The community’s secular hearth, set at the southern tip of an island where the Mohawk meets the Hudson, with room for events indoors and out. It is the kind of hall where weddings, christenings and dances have run for decades, and where the diaspora’s politics and charity are organised as readily as its parties.
The Cohoes Holodomor Monument, Pulaski Street. A small memorial park honours the millions who died in the Stalin-orchestrated famine of 1932 and 1933. On 5 November 2017 more than a hundred and fifty people gathered here to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Holodomor, a measure of how seriously this community takes the duty of remembering.
St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, 67 Saratoga Street. The Orthodox counterpart to the Ukrainian Catholic parishes, drawing its founding families from the Lemko villages of the Carpathians. A small congregation today, it has become a spiritual home for Orthodox immigrants from across Eastern Europe, broadening the city’s Eastern Christian life beyond its original Rusyn and Ukrainian core.
Harmony Mills, off North Mohawk Street. The reason any of these families came at all. The vast Mill No. 3, nicknamed the Mastodon after a prehistoric elephant’s skeleton was unearthed during its construction, was the largest cotton mill in the world when it opened in 1872. Its red-brick ranges, now converted into flats, still loom over the Ukrainian streets below.
Cohoes Music Hall, 58 Remsen Street. Opened in 1874 and one of the oldest music halls still in use in the country, it stands as the civic centrepiece of the downtown the immigrants walked into. It anchors the streetscape that the Ukrainians of Cohoes have shared with their Irish, Italian and French Canadian neighbours for more than a century.
Where They Came From
The Ukrainians of Cohoes were, in the main, Galicians. Galicia was the north-eastern crownland of Austria-Hungary, a region of small farms, Greek Catholic parishes and chronic poverty that pushed perhaps hundreds of thousands of its people across the Atlantic between the 1880s and the First World War.
They left a place where land was scarce and arrived in a place where labour was needed. The looms of Cohoes offered wages a Galician village could not, and the chain pulled tight: one family sent for the next, one village street reassembling itself on a Cohoes block.
Later arrivals deepened the community. Displaced persons after the Second World War, refugees from Soviet rule, and most recently families fleeing the war that began in 2022 have all found their way to the Capital District, where the old parishes and clubs of Cohoes and Watervliet gave them a ready-made footing.
Cohoes Today
Cohoes is no longer the Spindle City of the census takers. The cotton looms fell silent generations ago, the great mills have become flats, and the city’s largest reported ancestries today are Italian, Irish, German, French and Polish rather than Ukrainian. The Ukrainian presence is smaller than it was, and like every white ethnic community of the old industrial north it has thinned through suburban drift and intermarriage.
Yet it has not vanished, and it does not behave like a community in retreat. The golden dome of Sts. Peter and Paul still rises over Ontario Street, and the Ukrainian-American Citizens Club on Pulaski Street still fills. The Capital District Ukrainian Festival, hosted in Cohoes, draws crowds for traditional food, crafts and live music, with proceeds in recent years sent home to support Ukraine.
The war has, painfully, made the diaspora’s work urgent again. The community that gathered at the Holodomor monument to remember a famine ninety years gone now raises money for a country fighting for its life. In a city built on the memory of its mills, the Ukrainians of Cohoes remain one of the most living memories of all.
For readers tracing the wider arc of this diaspora, the story rhymes across the country: in the Ukrainian Village of Chicago, in the parishes of Whippany, New Jersey, in Warren, Michigan, and as far west as Sacramento, California. The same Galician faith, the same golden domes, the same insistence on remembering. Cohoes shares its corner of New York with other heritage communities too, from the Italians of Massapequa to the Jewish families of Syosset on Long Island.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Ukrainians settle in Cohoes, New York?
The Ukrainians in Cohoes came chiefly from Galicia, a poor province of Austria-Hungary, drawn by work in the city’s enormous textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century. Cohoes was the Spindle City, and its looms and canals offered wages that a Galician farming village could not.
What is the main Ukrainian church in Cohoes?
The Church of Sts. Peter and Paul at 198 Ontario Street is the main Ukrainian Catholic parish in Cohoes. It was built in 1907 by a committee led by Lucas Jadlos, held its first liturgy in early 1908, and is recognisable by its large golden dome.
What is the connection between Cohoes and St. Nicholas in Watervliet?
St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in nearby Watervliet was built between 1906 and 1908 to serve the Ukrainians of Watervliet, Cohoes and South Troy jointly, before Cohoes completed its own parish. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 for its onion-domed architecture.
Is there a Ukrainian festival in Cohoes?
Yes. The Capital District Ukrainian Festival is hosted in Cohoes, typically at the Ukrainian-American Citizens Club on Pulaski Street, with traditional food, crafts and live music. In recent years its proceeds have gone to support Ukraine during the war.
Where did the Ukrainians in Cohoes originally come from?
Most traced their origins to Galicia, the Greek Catholic, largely rural crownland of Austria-Hungary that today straddles western Ukraine and south-eastern Poland. Later waves included post-war displaced persons and, most recently, refugees from the war that began in 2022.
Does Cohoes have a Holodomor memorial?
Yes. A small memorial park on Pulaski Street in Cohoes holds a monument to the victims of the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered famine of 1932 and 1933. The Albany-area Ukrainian community gathers there for remembrance, including a ceremony marking the famine’s eighty-fifth anniversary in 2017.
If your family’s story passed through Cohoes, or any of the places Ukrainians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Galician village under the Austro-Hungarian crown to a golden dome on Ontario Street, to wherever you are now.