The Capitol That Took Thirty-Two Years to Build

Work began on the New York State Capitol in eighteen sixty-seven. The building was finished in eighteen ninety-nine. Thirty-two years, three separate teams of architects, and twenty-five million dollars, the most expensive government building in the United States at the time.

The architects fired each other. Thomas Fuller started it, then Leopold Eidlitz and Henry Hobson Richardson took over and redesigned the upper floors in a Renaissance Classical idiom. When cost overruns mounted, Governor Grover Cleveland dismissed them both and handed the whole project to Isaac G.

Perry, who pushed it to completion in the Richardsonian Romanesque style that now defines the building's character. The Capitol has no dome, one of only eleven state capitols in the country without one. Its weight alone proved a structural hazard: the building slowly began shifting downhill toward State Street, stress fractures appearing in the stone, requiring an added exterior staircase on the east facade just to brace the structure and halt the movement.

Inside, the Great Western Staircase climbs the building in carved Sienna sandstone. Somewhere in the stonework are hundreds of carved portrait faces, faces of historical figures, prominent citizens, and working people, embedded into the stone by craftsmen who had license to choose some of their own subjects. The staircase earned the nickname the Million Dollar Staircase, though its actual construction costs were folded into the building's larger total.

In March of nineteen eleven, a fire destroyed almost the entire New York State Library collection housed in the building, centuries of irreplaceable manuscripts and artifacts burned while one hundred twenty-five firefighters worked through the night. The cause was never definitively established. The building is still the seat of the New York Legislature.

It has been quietly settling into its hillside for over a hundred and fifty years.