Once Called ‘Boondoggery,’ Albany Plaza Now Anchors Building Boom : Nelson Rockefeller’s ‘Edifice Complex’ Beginning to Take Root
Grudgingly, New York’s capital city is finally learning to live with Nelson Rockefeller’s “edifice complex,” as some derided the $2-billion project when construction began two decades ago.
Since its completion seven years ago, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, with its immense state office building, convention center and museum complex, has become the focus of a building boom that is rejuvenating Albany, one of the oldest cities in North America.
Block after block of the shabby brownstones and carriage houses that shamed Rockefeller and led to his conception of the project 25 years ago are being restored to their turn-of-the-century grandeur around the plaza.
Greenwich-Village Look
Some say the streets are even acquiring a Greenwich Village-kind of urbane quality, all within sight of Rockefeller’s ultra-modern mass of granite, marble, steel and glass.
A decade ago, these neighborhoods were largely populated by the poor Albanians uprooted from the 40-block area expropriated by the state for the project. Now, they are among the hottest rental properties in the area and home to many of the young professionals who work in the plaza.
Rents for two-bedroom apartments in the streets adjacent to the plaza--the fringes of a slum two decades ago--average between $550 and $650 a month without utilities, according to real estate agent Jean Palumbo.
Rents for some “luxury” brownstone apartments in the area now approach $1,000 a month.
It’s all a far cry from the way the streets looked in 1960, when Rockefeller, as New York governor, toured downtown Albany with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands.
“I could see the way the city was running down and what this lady might think” he later told aides. “Here was a great Dutch city built in the New World, and then she comes to look at it, never having seen it before. My God!”
Modeled After Tibet Palace
Rockefeller’s inspiration for the plaza was the palace of the Dalai Lama at Lhasa, Tibet, which he had visited as a young man. To execute the design he sketched out on the back of an envelope, the governor selected Wallace Harrison, who had designed another symbol of his family’s visions, Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center.
With the concept firm in his mind, Rockefeller shocked the city when he had an aide walk into the Albany County Clerk’s office and file a map on March 27, 1962, seizing nearly 100 acres of downtown Albany. When the map was stamped by the clerk, the state became the owner of 1,150 buildings and landlord to about 6,000 residents, most poor, some destitute. All would be gone within three years.
“The city turns over poorer people for richer people,” said Christopher Smith, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany. “Those people who are lost are exactly the ones the city wants lost.”
The expropriated area was nicknamed “The Gut,” and parts of it lived up to its inelegant designation. It was the neighborhood where gangster Jack (Legs) Diamond was murdered in 1931. Brothels could be found along the narrow streets. The city jail, near a ready supply of customers, was built there.
“Seedy,” is the way Albany Mayor Thomas Whalen III remembered it.
Housed Historic Landmarks
However, the area also contained historic landmarks, more than 100 legitimate businesses and four churches. One neighborhood that disappeared entirely was a conclave of first- and second-generation Italians on Jefferson Street.
“Rockefeller made a comment that the worst part of Albany is gone,” said Sam Aquino, who grew up on Jefferson Street. “He was mistaken when he made that statement.”
“If a little child was in the street crying, you didn’t have to worry where his mother was because anyone would take care of him,” recalled Ann Aquino.
The impending mall construction prompted a migration from the targeted plaza site. Smith and his students tracked those displaced by the plaza by tracing their addresses in city directories for 1965, 1970, 1975 and 1981.
“Many people just literally moved up the street” onto the fringes of the plaza, Smith said. In later years, Smith and his students were unable to find many of the original residents in city directories.
The prospect of uprooting thousands of poor Albany residents did not daunt Rockefeller as the project was being built. Nor did its skyrocketing costs.
Cost to State in Billions
When plaza plans were first unveiled in 1962, it was to be a 4-year project costing $250 million. By the late summer and fall of 1965, when construction actually began, it had doubled in price. When the project was completed a dozen years later, the price had risen to more than $1.5 billion. It now will likely cost the state just under $2 billion when the bonds and the interest are paid off at the end of this century.
The project also moved ahead despite building delays, design changes and more sinister doings that plagued it from the outset.
There were 60 fires on the site, one alone causing $2.4 million in damage. To this day, there are problems keeping marble from flaking off some of the plaza buildings. And theft was a recurring headache: $500,000 worth of steel rods disappeared one day, $78,000 of plywood another day. No one was ever prosecuted for the thefts.
The plaza, Albany’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and historian William Kennedy has said, was “one of the most perfectly designed perpetual-opportunity machines in the history of boondoggery.”
Rockefeller himself was enchanted with the construction.
‘Best Thing Since Pyramids’
His speech writer, Joseph Persico, recalled being in Rockefeller’s plane as it flew over the construction site. The governor leaned over to an aide and exclaimed: “You know, this is the best thing since the pyramids.”
“Concrete excited him most,” Persico said. The plaza was a project sure to hold the governor’s enthusiasm.
More than 900,000 cubic yards of concrete were poured into the site; 3.1 million cubic yards of earth had to be moved as the 100 acres were fashioned for construction; and 232,000 tons of steel were used to gird the structures--the equivalent of 20 Eiffel Towers.
Marble was imported from as far away as Georgia for the project, skilled workers from farther away than that.
And when it was dedicated in 1978 in Rockefeller’s honor, just a few months before his death, the plaza was everything he had hoped for--as much a monument to him as Rockefeller Center was to his father, John D. Rockefeller II.
One end of the plaza is anchored by the largest state museum in the nation, and nearby is the 42-story Erastus Corning II Tower. Four identical 23-story office buildings stand opposite, across two football field-sized reflecting pools. Behind the office buildings is the Department of Motor Vehicles headquarters, which extends for nearly one-fifth of a mile.
Egg-Shaped Arts Center
The most eye-catching structure on the plaza is the $42-million Performing Arts Center, invariably called the “Egg” because of its oval design, though it resembles more a shallow-bottomed boat. It houses two theaters.
Inside the plaza complex are a convention center and meeting rooms, banks, restaurants, newsstands and barbershops. A dozen huge mobiles and statues adorn the outside of the plaza, dozens of murals and paintings line the marble walls inside. Most of the artwork was chosen personally by Rockefeller. All of it is in the modernistic style he favored.
“In my mind, the genius of the South Mall was the way in which they melded the office building use with a cultural use that makes the complex into a tourist attraction,” said William Hennessy, who helped choose the site and was later state Democratic Party chairman. “It did exactly what Rocky wanted it to do.”
It has served myriad purposes: Gov. Mario M. Cuomo was inaugurated in the plaza and former Gov. Hugh Carey held his wedding reception there. Boxing matches and high school graduations have been staged inside. James Brown has sung there, and Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson were filmed in a scene for the movie “Rollover” in one of the complex’s futuristic marble wells.
Biggest Tourist Spot
It has become Albany’s biggest tourist attraction, plaza director Tom Christensen says, with more than a million visitors a year.
However, Kenneth Male of the local chamber of commerce says the complex “really contributed to the deterioration of downtown” Albany by forcing the relocation of thousands of residents out of the immediate area.
He attributes the rebirth of the downtown area, which has coincided with the seven years the plaza has been fully occupied, to a commerce-boosting partnership between local businesses and city government.
