Steps now cost $41M
Almost 70 years later, repairs to the Capitol’s famed exterior staircase still incomplete
Three weeks before the completion of a major refurbishment of the state Capitol’s famous Eastern Approach, top officials decided to celebrate the repairs by bringing a Memorial Day parade onto the broad staircase.
Standing at the top of the Approach, you can understand the appeal of the idea: The staircase is at once a grand entrance to the seat of state government and a sort of presentation stage that through the decades has hosted everything from political rallies to a World War II-era demonstration of the climbing power of Army jeeps. From the promenade at the top, the view across East Capitol Park and down State Street is one of the most sweeping cityscapes in upstate.
So New York’s superintendent of public works sent a letter to the state architect, asking if the parade concept was feasible — the long-awaited repairs were, after all, all but done.
The architect applied the brakes: “It is of the opinion of this office that these steps should not be used for public demonstrations until the above repairs have been made.”
This exchange is from May 1953. Almost seven decades later, the repairs to the Capitol’s most recognizable exterior feature remain incomplete.
The architect’s list of unaddressed problems included the need to repair the balustrades, the ornamental railings on the steps (“nothing has been done in the present contract”). This last major work on the staircase had been underfunded by the state Legislature. The 1953 repairs came in about $1.9 million in today’s dollars, or $700,000 short of the proposed cost.
The century-long story of the deterioration of the Eastern Approach offers a reminder that procrastination and cost-cutting are not political tendencies exclusive to the current day. The issues that the Eisenhower-era engineers were trying to fix had become evident in the 1920s, about three decades after the stairs were built as an add-on to the Capitol in 1897.
And according to the findings of a 2014 statecommissioned investigation obtained by the Times Union through a Freedom of Information Law request, the same deficiencies have plagued the steps in recent decades — primarily the lack of a proper waterproofing system to deal with the pitiless upstate climate.
As the years have passed, the cost of repairs has increased: The current proposed bill to fix the Eastern Approach is about $41 million, doubling the construction cost from when the report was completed eight years ago.
“Continued unmanaged water entry will cause further damage and may result in future structural instability,” the 2014 report by engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger reads.
The report was kept out of the public eye during the administration of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who trumpeted the extensive repairs to the Capitol that were completed after he took office in 2011.
Its authors said that time was of the essence. “The brick masonry bearing walls are so heavily deteriorated and displaced that they are no longer stable and need to be addressed immediately,” the report reads.
The problem was so acute that engineers were able to pull bricks out by hand from a section of wall under the steps that was “in danger of collapse.” Certain balustrades needed to be replaced — possibly the same ones the state architect was concerned about in 1953.
Immediate repairs mentioned in the 2014 report were completed under an emergency contract, but not until two to three years later.
Since at least 2016, the stairs have been closed to the public, the state Office of General Services previously told the Times Union, although access to all 77 steps was limited at least as early as 2015.
The most recent investigation started in 2012, one year into Cuomo’s time as governor, and was intended to “provide a structural survey and investigation for comprehensive repairs and rehabilitation of the Eastern Approach staircase and Eastern Promenade deck,” which had shown signs of settlement and leaking.
A $350,000 contract was awarded in 2013 and amended to a $1.3 million project in 2016, according to records from the Office of the State Comptroller. Less than $800,000 ultimately was spent on the investigation and design plans for the steps.
Under the $41 million proposal that’s part of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s first budget proposal, the steps may finally be fully repaired. It would be three years until they could be opened to the public.
“Visitors would once again be able to climb the stairs as the original architects envisioned and see the phenomenal display of ornate stone carvings, view the city of Albany and experience the tremendous scale and importance of the Capitol,” OGS spokesman Joseph A. Brill said in a statement.
Saturated history
The problems with the Eastern Approach — and the structures underneath and alongside the stairs — are relatively straightforward and boil down to a central tenet of engineering: Water always wins.
It pools onto the staircase’s granite landings, seeps through cracks and can flood the basement with up to a foot of runoff. Left unchecked, the resulting corrosion “may destabilize portions of the stair structure,” according to the report.
Albany’s harsh winter climate with its freezethaw cycles adds to the damage every year. Even so, the foundation itself is not substantially settling, the engineers wrote.
The early-1950s repairs included the installation of a partial waterproofing system, but only on the fourth and final landing of the steps. That system, installed when a granite landing was replaced by concrete, is no longer functional.
It is unclear from the records whether a more comprehensive waterproofing system would have been put in if the project had been fully funded.
Issues with waterproofing have a longer history, based on the findings of the 2014 investigation, which dug up old correspondences between highranking state officials, books, newspaper clippings and photographs from the State Archives as well as aged architectural drawings.
“State Capitol approach held dangerous now: Climatic conditions cause its disintegration and governor is warned,” read a headline in the 1924 New York Sun.
“The front approach of the state Capitol is slowly crumbling away,” the story began. “It comprises one of the most massive piles of solid granite and masonry in the country, and its gradual disintegration has been causing considerable alarm to state officials for some time.”
Various plans for reconstruction — or outright
removal of the staircase — were brought forward in the quarter century that followed. The Legislature, wary of approving costly repairs to the Capitol after decades of work to build it in the first place, failed to agree on a plan until 1951.
“Capitol steps ‘falling down’; public barred,” read a December 1951 Knickerbocker News front-page headline.
It stated that Gov. Thomas E. Dewey (in office from 1943 to 1954) had proposed a complete redesign that would have cost $250,000. Like governors before and after him, Dewey would enter the Capitol under the arcade arch known as the executive ramp. He was concerned the “steps might fall on his head some day.”
“Nothing came of the proposal,” reads the Knickerbocker News article, which ran alongside a story on the death total from the Korean War.
By 1952, a new $250,000 proposal was put forward. A letter to the state architect noted that “this scheme will provide the necessary structural stability to prevent any possible collapse of the granite steps due to the excessive corrosion.”
But almost a quarter of the proposed cost was lopped off for a final budget of $183,432. The waterproofing was incomplete, and the balustrades remained in precarious positions because of the water damage.
Legacy
The 2014 report barely made its way to a blueribbon Capitol improvement commission, which included longtime state Assemblyman and local historian Jack McEneny. The retired lawmaker remembers the fact that report existed, but does not recall ever receiving the final report or a comprehensive briefing on its findings.
“The assumption was OGS was working on it (and) the problem would be solved,” McEneny said. “And what you’re finding is nothing has been done or very little has been done.”
The commission has not met since the coronavirus pandemic, according to its members. Its chair resigned.
The panel had previously pushed forward on other major improvements to the Capitol. Gov. George Pataki initiated repairs to the roof that were completed early in Cuomo’s tenure. Cuomo was in office for the completion of work on the building ’s two eastern skylights and the space between them — a former pigeon roost that was turned into modern office space.
A spokesman for Cuomo, who resigned amid scandal last year, defended his legacy of repairs to the Capitol: “This seems like yet another attempt to rewrite history, but it doesn’t change the fact that no other administration did more to rebuild and revamp the Capitol and tell the story of the building ’s rich legacy,” Rich Azzopardi said in an email.
Azzopardi argued the post-pandemic federal aid influx makes it more possible to fix the steps today than during the decade Cuomo was in office.
State officials expected work on problems deemed in 2014 as in need of “immediate” repair to be folded into a larger project to repair the Eastern Approach. An “absence of funding ” for the full project, during the Cuomo administration, delayed the repair, according to the state agency.
Instead, the urgent work was addressed roughly two years later under an emergency contract, according to OGS.
Despite that slate of patchwork fixes, an April 2021 report to OGS said the continued deterioration came with a new price tag of $24 million, up from $17 million. The cost rose again over the ensuing months as monitoring reports found further damage. Construction costs are now up to $33 million, according to the state, boosting the total proposed expenditure to $41 million.
According to the 2021 report, the pressure on the retaining walls of the executive ramp now exceeds capacity, leading to structural instability.
In recent years, the Eastern Approach has been hemmed in with tall fencing bearing DANGER signs. “Staircase closed due to structural instability,” they read. “Entry is strictly prohibited.”