BGuthrie Photos: NY -- Albany -- Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza

NY -- Albany -- Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza:

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Description of Pictures: After Saratoga, I hightailed it to Albany to tour the state capital. It was 4pm on Labor Day and I figured a tourist spot like this would still be open. Wrong. The building and everything else in the governmental complex including their state museum was completely closed. From the outside , however, the building, under repairs of course, was very impressive. I spent a lot of time photographing statues and wall ornamentation. The complex also had an egg-shaped building that served as an auditorium. The complex was completely deserted except for two bus-loads of Japanese tourists who were milling around taking pictures.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] EMPLAZ_010903_001.JPG	[2] EMPLAZ_010903_002.JPG	[3] EMPLAZ_010903_007.JPG
[4] EMPLAZ_010903_008.JPG	[5] EMPLAZ_010903_009.JPG	[6] EMPLAZ_010903_012.JPG
[7] EMPLAZ_010903_013.JPG	[8] EMPLAZ_010903_015.JPG	[9] EMPLAZ_010903_016.JPG
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[25] EMPLAZ_010903_040.JPG	[26] EMPLAZ_010903_042.JPG	[27] EMPLAZ_010903_044.JPG
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[31] EMPLAZ_010903_052.JPG	[32] EMPLAZ_010903_054.JPG	[33] EMPLAZ_010903_056.JPG
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[40] EMPLAZ_010903_072.JPG	[41] EMPLAZ_010903_074.JPG	[42] EMPLAZ_010903_076.JPG
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[49] EMPLAZ_010903_090.JPG	[50] EMPLAZ_010903_092.JPG	[51] EMPLAZ_010903_094.JPG
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[55] EMPLAZ_010903_102.JPG	[56] EMPLAZ_010903_104.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. EMPLAZ_010903_002.JPG: The Egg. This is the concert hall.
2. EMPLAZ_010903_008.JPG: Behind the Egg is one of the state office buildings
3. EMPLAZ_010903_009.JPG: Firefighter memorial
4. EMPLAZ_010903_013.JPG: The flat building is the background is the New York State Museum
5. EMPLAZ_010903_015.JPG: Various regular-people statues exist around the city. We have them in DC too but usually they're not painted like these are.
6. EMPLAZ_010903_016.JPG: Philip Schuyler's statue. The odd thing is I can't see from the history books that he was all that successful as an American Revolution general. The battles and major victory at Saratoga, for example, happened just after he resigned.
7. EMPLAZ_010903_018.JPG: The City Hall building is behind the Schuyler statue
8. EMPLAZ_010903_021.JPG: I think this the Court of Appeals building
9. EMPLAZ_010903_022.JPG: This statue of George Washington must be in just about every state capital in the original 13 colonies.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Empire State Plaza
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza (commonly known as simply the Empire State Plaza and less formally as The South Mall) is a complex of several state government buildings in downtown Albany, New York.

History:

The 98-acre (39 ha) complex, the brainchild of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, was built between 1965 and 1978 for 1.7 billion dollars. Wallace Harrison was the principal architect of the plaza. Rockefeller was inspired to create the new government space in 1959 upon the visit of Princess Beatrix. The Corning Tower and Agency buildings were completed in 1973, the Cultural Education Center in 1976, and the Egg in 1978. Today, over 13,000 state employees work at the complex.

Characteristics:

The Plaza consists of various marble and steel buildings, seated on a six-story marble platform along the Hudson River. The buildings comprising the Plaza include:

* the four Agency buildings (numbered "Agency 1" through "Agency 4")
* the Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd Tower
* The Egg
* the Cultural Education Center (State Museum, Library, and Archives)
* the Justice Building
* the Legislative Office Building
* the Swan Street Building (sectioned into "Core 1" through "Core 4")

The Plaza also features a skating rink and fountains, an underground corridor ("the concourse") connecting all of the buildings in the Plaza and the Capitol, and various sculptures and works of art. Several memorials are located on the Plaza, including the New York State Fallen Firefighters Memorial and Vietnam War Memorial.

The scale of the buildings in the Plaza is impressive, and the complex is the most easily recognizable aspect of the Albany skyline. The Corning Tower is the tallest building in New York state outside of New York City; the Swan Street Building is over a quarter of a mile long and inspired by Pharaoh Hatshepsut's Temple at Deir el-Bahri, Egypt.

The Plaza tends to be windier than the surrounding city. There is also a limited amount of shade. These factors can make winters feel colder and summers feel hotter.

About the buildings:

The buildings are laid around a row of three reflecting pools. On the west side are the four 23-floor (310-foot/94 m) Agency towers. On the east side is the Egg (Meeting Center) and the 44-floor (589-foot/180 m) Corning Tower, which has an observation deck on the 42nd floor. On the south end is the Cultural Education Center, set on a higher platform; and on the north end sits the New York State Capitol.

The Plaza itself is actually the largest building of all. Four of the floors are for parking, while the fifth floor (the concourse) contains a bus/taxicab depot, a post office, cafeterias, a convention center and meeting rooms, retailers, banks, and a visitor center.

Art at the Plaza:

The plaza has a large number of modern art paintings and sculptures at various locations. Most are works of the New York School and were created in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists represented include Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Alexander Calder, and Chryssa. Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, has called the Plaza's collection of American art "...the most important State collection of modern art in the country."

Controversy:

Not unexpectedly, the complex was a significant controversy around the time of its construction. It was criticized for displacement of the former landowners (about 9,000 people were displaced, mostly from working-class and poorer sections of older Albany which ws home to ethnic communities of Jews and Italians), the cost of its lavish architecture (the towers are covered in marble so that one cannot see the individual floors), its sheer size, and its period architecture. In The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, Thames & Hudson, 1991 (ISBN 0-500-27582-3), Robert Hughes refers to the buildings as being in "The International Power Style of the Fifties", comparing the buildings to those built by Fascist governments.

Crossing through the plaza is the South Mall Arterial, a short highway artery connecting to the Dunn Memorial Bridge. Construction of this highway destroyed many buildings in Albany's downtown. In the initial proposal, the highway was to go from Interstate 90 in North Greenbush (current exit 8 to NY 43), through Rensselaer, under the plaza, and connecting to the also-cancelled Mid-Crosstown Arterial, which would have run from I-90 Exit 6, through the city, travelling underneath Washington Park, meeting with the South Mall Expressway in the process, and continuing on to the Thruway at Exit 23. The current South Mall Arterial ends abruptly in a loop at Swan Street, with both eastbound and westbound lanes using the two outer portals of the four portal tunnel leading under the plaza. (The inner two were to be express lanes to the Mid-Crosstown Arterial/SME interchange underneath the park.) The only evidence of the original Mid-Crosstown Arterial is the four level stack interchange for I-90 at present day US 9.
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