The Capitol That Took Twenty Years to Build

Ground was broken on the current Illinois State Capitol on March eleventh, eighteen sixty-eight. The building was not finished until eighteen eighty-eight. Twenty years of construction, four and a half million dollars, and the result stands three hundred and sixty-one feet tall, making it the tallest non-skyscraper state capitol in the United States.

The design is French Renaissance and Italianate, with a cross-shaped footprint, four equal wings, and a dome ninety-two and a half feet wide. The dome and tower roofs are clad in zinc alloy, which gives the building its silvery finish and does not corrode. The interior dome features a stained-glass replica of the Illinois state seal and a plaster frieze depicting state history.

The building replaced the fifth capitol, four blocks to the northeast. That earlier structure, now known as the Old State Capitol, was sold to Sangamon County in eighteen seventy-six for two hundred thousand dollars and became a courthouse. Inside, there is the odd story of the lamp sculptures.

The building's original lamp statues, installed in the eighteen-seventies, were deemed too risque by someone in authority and quietly removed. They sat in storage for well over a century. A fifty-million-dollar renovation completed in twenty-thirteen finally brought them back, restored and relit.

One detail the original builders did not bother with: working elevators. The shafts were built in, but left empty. Water-powered elevators were added in eighteen eighty-seven, just before the building opened.

The lawmakers, apparently, had been walking up the stairs.