The Pennsylvania State Capitol: Palace of Art and Scandal
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The dome you are looking at rises two hundred fifty-four feet above Harrisburg, its green Ludowici tiles catching light that shifts through every season. It weighs twenty-six thousand tons, was inspired by Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, and it cost the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania far more than anyone in the legislature had authorized.
The story of this building is inseparable from the story of the man who designed it. In nineteen oh one, a thirty-six-year-old Philadelphia architect named Joseph Miller Huston won the commission over eight other competitors. He described his vision as a "palace of art," and he meant it literally. He designed every room, every fixture, every clock. The grand staircase inside the rotunda was modeled on the Palais Garnier in Paris. The building contains four hundred seventy-five rooms. Bronze entrance doors open into a rotunda floored with Moravian tile.
When President Theodore Roosevelt dedicated the building on October fourth, nineteen oh six, he called it the handsomest building he had ever seen. The next day, investigators started asking questions about the price tag.
The appropriation had been roughly four million dollars for construction. The total bill came in closer to thirteen million. Furniture had been invoiced at multiples of its actual cost. Materials were billed by weight rather than market value, which created a perverse incentive to install the heaviest possible versions of everything. Huston and four others were convicted on December eighteenth, nineteen oh eight of conspiring to defraud the state. Huston appealed for two years, lost, and entered Eastern State Penitentiary in nineteen eleven.
The building he built survived his disgrace. The dome, the rotunda, the painted ceilings, the statue of the Commonwealth crowning the lantern at two hundred seventy-two feet, all of it still stands, still serves, still draws visitors who tip their heads back in the rotunda and wonder how a state capital in central Pennsylvania came to feel quite so much like a European cathedral.
