The Empire State Plaza and What Was There Before

Governor Nelson Rockefeller's vision for the Empire State Plaza was, by any measure, extraordinary. He wanted something that would make people who flew into Albany feel they had landed in a world capital. He sketched the first concept on a postcard while aboard his plane, somewhere over New York State.

The designers drew inspiration from Versailles, from Brasilia, from Le Corbusier's Chandigarh. The result was ninety-eight and a half acres of marble and concrete rising from the hillside below the Capitol, towers, a platform, reflecting pools, and a theater shaped like an egg. What had been there before was a neighborhood.

Several neighborhoods, actually. The South End and the area around Hudson Avenue housed thousands of working families, including communities anchored by a German national Catholic church established in eighteen fifty, a French Catholic church, a Greek Orthodox church, and rooming houses sheltering more than a thousand single men. When the state began acquiring the land in nineteen sixty-two, approximately seven thousand residents were displaced.

About twelve hundred structures were demolished over the following two years. The building campaign ran from the groundbreaking in June of nineteen sixty-five through the final completion of the Egg theater in nineteen seventy-eight. The original cost estimate was two hundred fifty million dollars.

The actual cost was approximately two billion. The Corning Tower rises five hundred eighty-nine feet, still the tallest building in New York State outside of New York City. The plaza is now filled with a significant art collection, ninety-two large-scale works by sixty-three artists, acquired during construction.

The people who lived in the neighborhoods that were cleared to build it left records behind: photographs, church registers, and the memory of what stood here before the marble arrived.