Ten years ago, the agency overseeing the upkeep of the majestic New York State Capitol reported that the granite staircase leading to the main entrance was warped and bulging so badly that part of it might collapse at any moment.
Inspectors discovered leaning balustrades, rusted steel supports, cracked and displaced granite, failed drainage systems and load-bearing brick walls so weakened by time and neglect that individual bricks could be removed by hand.
A thorough repair, estimated at $17 million, was recommended. Instead, only a handful of urgent fixes were made.
The entrance, known as the Eastern Approach, has been closed to this day, with access-blocking barricades now a familiar part of the downtown landscape.
In a state capital known for its inefficiency and inability to meet deadlines, the staircase and the Capitol’s exterior are visual reminders of Albany’s tendency toward disrepair and dysfunction.
There are scaffolding “sidewalk sheds,” bicycle rack barricades or construction fencing on every side of the French Renaissance- and Romanesque-styled Capitol. During winter months, most of the adjacent Empire State Plaza is also walled off with temporary barricades to keep people from slipping and getting hurt on the icy plaza — even though there has hardly been any snow or ice this winter.
And nearly everyone who enters the Capitol has to use one of its darkened side entrances or an underground entryway through the Empire State Plaza.
Assemblywoman Pat Fahy, whose district includes Albany, took office in 2013 just as the staircase was closed off. She applauded the renovations of the Capitol interior under former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, but said the state has long neglected the exterior, “which is what most people get to see.”
“It sends the wrong message,” she said. “Capitols in other states are major tourist destinations.”
For many years, the Eastern Approach served as a grand gateway to the Capitol, a place where it is said Theodore Roosevelt raced up the 77 steps for exercise and sport when he was governor. In the decades since, it has played host to political speeches, protest marches and countless wedding photo shoots.
But its history of problems is also well chronicled.
A century ago, the Eastern Approach — the last major piece of the Capitol to be built — was said by The New York Sun to be “slowly crumbling away.”
“The continued deterioration will sooner or later turn it into a complete ruin,” according to the 1924 article, which put the estimated repair cost at $1 million, or about $91 million in today’s dollars.
Yet, according to the 2014 report, no appropriation was made until 1951, when the staircase had to be closed to the public for fear of collapse, as it is again today.
By the time the state finally committed to doing a more thorough repair job on the stairway, the damage and the costs had both risen. Urgent repairs in 2016 that cost roughly $120,000 saved the weakest section from collapsing, but water and snow-melting salt continued to eat away at the approach.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who inherited the staircase problem when she became governor in 2021, pushed through a $41 million appropriation to fix it, more than double the estimated cost in 2014.
Ms. Hochul said the Eastern Approach has been closed off to the public for far too long. She recalled being in awe of the Capitol as a 16-year-old intern, when she could walk out onto the eastern steps from the building’s second floor, which houses the governor’s office she now occupies.
“I welcome the day when people can come up those front steps and take the photos they want,” she said at a recent gaggle with reporters. “This is their building.”
With winter technically over in Albany, state officials plan to re-examine the areas beneath the bulging granite steps and leaky promenade slabs, where they’ve already found failed drainage infrastructure.
“These projects don’t get any easier over time,” said Jeanette Moy, commissioner of the Office of General Services. “The costs are just going to go up, inflation is just going to increase, and then water damage gets worse.”
For now they’re lining up contractors, with an eye toward starting work next spring and finishing it in 2028. It’s possible, depending on the deterioration level of the staircase, that the estimated cost could rise again.
The staircase’s lead project coordinator, Bridget O’Hanlon, who serves under Ms. Moy as deputy commissioner for design and construction, is determined to make a clean break from Albany’s tradition of applying temporary salves to gaping structural wounds at the Capitol.
“By doing one small piece of it, you weren’t addressing the larger issue,” Ms. O’Hanlon said. “In the next 100 years, when our children or grandchildren are here, I think the Eastern Approach will be in good shape.”
The Capitol was painstakingly built over 32 years beginning in 1867, a period marked by mishap, contracting abuses and cost overruns. It was the most expensive government building of its time.
In the 1880s, the ceiling in the State Assembly was, as a New York Times headline put it, “Falling Down In Chunks” and had become “a source of anxiety in the Legislature” as loose stones would drop from a height of 80 feet down into the chamber.
“The idea of a completed State Capitol is one which the people of the state absorb with difficulty,” The Times reported in 1898, observing that New Yorkers had come to expect the construction would “go on forever.”