UNIQUE NATURAL GAS HOLDER GIVES OWNER A BIT OF TROY HISTORY.(Capital Region)

Byline: PATRICK KURP Staff writer

Standing at the east end of his storage shed, beyond the motorboats, school buses and a disassembled pipe organ, William Sage carries on intimate conversations with his son at the west end - 104 feet away.

Through an acoustical fluke, voices leap across the interior of his gas-holder house - "I thought it was a trick," Sage said - like ideas across the centuries.

From the outside, the circular brick structure at Fifth Avenue and Jefferson Street towers over the shops and row houses of South Troy, and most resembles another artifact of an earlier industrial age - the railroad roundhouse.

Inside, it's shadowy and cavernous but also elegant, topped with a symmetrical web of radial roof trussing. Windows and pilasters break the regularity of the circular brick wall, and lead the eyes to the light that pours through the windows in the cupola, high overhead.

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