ALBANY — From street level, it must have been a peculiar scene.

Two women paused on Central Avenue Monday morning and stood at attention with their hands over their hearts as the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” drifted up from somewhere unseen below.

About 14 feet beneath them in a courtyard outside the Townsend Park Homes, Ron Scott watched in silence as a large American flag ascended one of two brand-new 50-foot silver flagpoles rising in front of the 18-story apartment building at Henry Johnson Boulevard.

For Scott, 68, an Ohio native and retired radio broadcaster who spent much of his adult life in the Army and New York Army National Guard, the brief ceremony marked the completion of a years-long quest since he noticed that when the Veterans Day, Memorial Day and Columbus Day parades approached the Albany Housing Authority complex, the bands would stop playing music.

“I’ve been on this mission for four years,” is the way he told it.