Ronald Canestrari

Ron Canestrari died on the morning of Monday 9 November 2026, aged 83. Assemblyman John T. McDonald III, who had been his neighbour for three decades, announced the death and said Canestrari had been ill for more than three weeks. The death was reported by the Times Union. No cause of death was given, and funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Ronald J. Canestrari was born on 22 May 1943 in Cohoes, New York. He attended the Christian Brothers Academy in Albany, where he and Jack McEneny, later a fellow Assembly member, would hold long political discussions. He traced his interest in government to the 1956 Democratic National Convention, when as an eighth grader he followed John F. Kennedy's bid for the vice presidential nomination.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Fordham College in 1965, where he was a leader of the Young Democrats, and a law degree from Fordham University School of Law in 1968. He campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy and from 1969 to 1971 served as an enlisted member of the United States Army, afterwards working as an attorney for the federal government and the Army.

Canestrari was elected mayor of Cohoes in 1975, aged 32, winning by 67 votes against a candidate backed by the Citizens Party, a faction of disaffected city Democrats. He served as mayor from 1976 until 1989. He was active in the New York State Conference of Mayors and served as its president. Among his achievements as mayor he singled out the rehabilitation of an old church on Mohawk Street to house the Cohoes Public Library.

In 1989 he was elected to the New York State Assembly, succeeding Michael McNulty, and he sat in the 188th to 199th Legislatures for the 106th District, which covered parts of Albany, Rensselaer and Saratoga counties, sections of Albany and Troy and all of Cohoes and Rensselaer. He chaired the Higher Education Committee, which created a matching capital grant programme for private colleges, and he championed the region's nanotechnology industry, helping to found the Watervliet Arsenal Business and Technology Partnership and the NanoCollege at the University at Albany.

In 2007 he became Majority Leader of the Assembly, an unusual achievement for an upstate Democrat, and held the post until 2012. He was returned unopposed in 2008 and 2010. On 10 April 2012 he told a packed news conference in his office that he would not seek re-election, and he left the Assembly at the end of that year after nearly 40 years in public service, succeeded in the new 108th District by his next door neighbour John McDonald.

Canestrari lived in Cohoes all his life. His Assembly office held a poster from the New York State Theater Institute's production of Fiorello, Kennedy memorabilia and a sketch of Cohoes City Hall, reflecting his love of Italian culture and the arts, his Democratic politics and his home city. A keen traveller, especially to Italy, he planned a Caribbean cruise days after retiring and trips to the Mediterranean, Tibet and Nepal, joking that people would still see him, "but mostly at the airport".

Over almost four decades Canestrari moved from city hall in Cohoes to one of the top posts in the State Assembly while representing the community where he was born. His work on higher education and on the Watervliet Arsenal and University at Albany nanotechnology projects is credited with helping to build the Capital Region's Tech Valley economy, and the library he created in a former church remains a part of Cohoes life.