Ron Canestrari

Ronald J. Canestrari, the longtime mayor of Cohoes who went on to become Majority Leader of the New York State Assembly, died on the morning of Monday, November 9, 2026, after an illness of several weeks. He was 83. His death was confirmed by Assemblyman John T. McDonald III, his neighbor of three decades, and reported by the Albany Times Union the same day.

Ron Canestrari was born in Cohoes, New York, on May 22, 1943, and stayed rooted in the small Hudson River city for his whole life. He attended Christian Brothers Academy in Albany, graduated from Fordham College in 1965 and earned his law degree from Fordham University School of Law in 1968. He then served as an enlisted soldier in the United States Army from 1969 to 1971 and worked as an attorney for the Army and the federal government.

In 1975 he was elected mayor of Cohoes, and he led the city for thirteen years, also serving as president of the New York State Conference of Mayors. In 1988 he won a seat in the State Assembly, where he represented Cohoes, Rensselaer and parts of Albany, Troy and the surrounding counties from 1989 to 2012. He chaired the Assembly's Higher Education Committee, and in 2007 he was chosen Majority Leader, a rare post for a Democrat from upstate New York.

He announced in April 2012 that he would not seek another term and retired at the end of that year, closing a public career of more than three and a half decades. Colleagues and neighbors remembered him as a devoted son of Cohoes who never stopped working for the Capital Region.

Photo: UpstateNYer, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.