Albany Architecture Route: The Real Theme of This City
Detail of the New York State Capitol Great Western Staircase
A full day tracing 8 buildings that explain why architecture obsessives fly here on purpose.
Morning: the Capitol and Marcus Reynolds
9am: New York State Capitol tour. This is one of the last great American state capitols built without a dome, at $25 million (1899 dollars) it was the most expensive government building in America at completion. Richardson, Eidlitz, and Isaac Perry each ran phases and the result is legibly weird. The Million Dollar Staircase has 77 stone-carved faces and is genuinely one of the great interior spaces in the country.
10:30: walk to Broadway. Marcus T. Reynolds designed the D&H Railroad building (now SUNY Plaza) in 1918 as a Flemish Gothic hall based on the Cloth Hall of Ypres. It's the single best building in Albany. Nobody knows this.
Midday: Empire State Plaza
Noon: Empire State Plaza. Wallace Harrison built this between 1965 and 1976 for Nelson Rockefeller. Love it or loathe it — most people loathe it — it's the fullest expression of postwar corporate modernism at civic scale in North America. The Egg (Harrison and Abramowitz, 1978) is either brilliant or ridiculous. Stand under it and decide.
Lunch at the concourse level. The concourse itself displays part of the New York State Modern Art Collection — Rothko, Motherwell, Nevelson, and others. Free.
Afternoon: Center Square, Washington Park, and beyond
2pm: walk the brownstones of Lancaster, Jay, and Hudson Streets in Center Square — the largest intact 19th-century urban neighborhood in upstate New York. 3pm: the Executive Mansion on Eagle Street (exterior only, by appointment for tours). 4pm: Washington Park and the Washington Avenue Armory (1889, still standing and still in use).
5pm: drive or Uber to Menands to see the Albany Rural Cemetery, where Chester Arthur is buried and where the funerary architecture from 1841 forward is a museum in itself. Sleep downtown. Dinner at Jack's Oyster House, itself a 1913 room worth the visit.
Before you book
The questions people ask about Center Square, answered with this month’s numbers.
By reservation only, and tours are limited. Book weeks ahead through the governor's office website. Most people just admire the exterior.
The Egg. It's a fine piece of Brutalism but it's a 15-minute exterior stop, not the destination people expect. The Reynolds D&H building deserves twice the attention and gets none.
