Why it seems like there’s nothing to do in Albany
ALBANY — This city’s recent history is largely a story of missed opportunities.
Empire State Plaza is perhaps the best example, but there are others, including the University at Albany uptown campus and its neighbor, the W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus. All three were massive investments built as islands apart from the surrounding city, rather than as places that connect to it.
The three places don’t encourage people to walk from where they work or go to school to nearby streets, which means they don’t encourage the types of businesses that depend on lively sidewalks.
The Harriman campus, in particular, was built with a wide ring road that acts as a moat, discouraging workers from venturing into the surrounding city.
The message is clear: Get in your car, head to the interstate and go somewhere else. Suburbia, most likely.
These mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s are part of the reason why, to a newcomer like ESPN commentator Rebecca Lobo, it looks as if there’s nothing to do in Albany — and why there often isn’t enough to do in Albany.
Other cities with large universities have shopping and nightlife districts that flow naturally from campus, but Albany mostly doesn’t have that. Some state capitals have shopping and restaurants mixed among state office buildings, but Albany doesn’t really have that either.
We can imagine what the city would be like if the $2 billion spent on Empire State Plaza had been used to build up Albany’s existing streets and neighborhoods, instead of eradicating them for a walledoff colossus that expresses suspicion of urban life. But we have to go forward with the city as it is, which means making choices based on different principles.
For Ualbany, it means using the former Albany High School for its College of Engineering and Applied Science, an ongoing move that will put students at Western and South Lake avenues in the heart of the city.
At Harriman, it means making the ring road more friendly to those on foot, a shift that gradually has been happening, and opening the campus to housing and retail, an endlessly discussed change that remains unrealized.
Make enough good decisions and the city will look a lot better to visitors like Lobo, who raised local hackles by saying during a recent Elite Eight game: “good luck trying to find something to do in Albany.” The city can react to the nationally televised comment with more cringe-worthy calls for an ESPN boycott, or it can resolve to be better.
Alas, the plan as it exists for a new Wadsworth Center will not make Albany better.
As reported by the Times Union’s Steve Hughes, the design calls for 930 parking spaces and a high fence around a 27-acre site on the Harriman campus. As Assemblywoman Pat Fahy noted, the plan offers a return to the bad design standards of the 1960s — and promises another island cut off from the city. Whoopee!
Wadsworth isn’t on the scale of Empire State Plaza or Harriman itself, obviously. Still, with an estimated cost of $1.7 billion, the new public health lab is a massive project presenting a rare opportunity. And the lab should be a big win for Albany, in that it will combine five facilities into one city location.
But the state has an obligation to spend the money in ways that encourage spinoff development and make the surrounding city better.
In other words, New York should not build Wadsworth as it is building the stadium for the Buffalo Bills — also a $1.7 billion project, being constructed on a suburban site surrounded by parking lots. An opportunity missed.
Ideally, Wadsworth would rise on one of the empty lots downtown. But if security or cost considerations mean it must be built at boring, bland Harriman, then the construction should help make the campus less bland. Wadsworth should be a starting point for residential and commercial development, for a real neighborhood.
Question: Isn’t it contradictory for a state government that pretends to care about climate change to build stadiums and employment hubs in ways that all but require massive amounts of transportation energy? But huge parking lots and streets where it’s a misery to walk are not just bad for the environment. They’re bad for cities.
Albany has great old neighborhoods where visitors can find things to do. The city also has dead zones created by bad design, areas of missed opportunities that make it look dull. If we see it, the lesson both offer is obvious.