Albany is a strange, dissonant city, whose architecture has long reflected its incoherence. It took nearly the entire second half of the nineteenth century to build the Capitol. One governor would spend a few years erecting a few stories in a particular architectural style before running out of money or being voted out of office. Then the next would choose a new approach for the subsequent few floors before himself being thwarted or replaced. The process repeated for decades before the gaudy monument to poor organization was finally cut off by Teddy Roosevelt in 1899. This left the building without a once-planned central tower and preserved it as an unusually disconnected design. Stained-glass skylights pierce the ceilings at odd intervals; palatial sandstone staircases spiral into apparent oblivion. One of them is carved with hundreds of faces, from U.S. presidents to the building’s own architects—a costly feat that earned it the nickname the Million Dollar Staircase.
After World War II, the thriving manufacturing hub of Albany’s golden years gave way to what the journalist Paul Grondahl described as “a shabby, dank and crumbling backwater … with about as much pizzazz as a Dutch wooden shoe.” Elected in 1958, Rockefeller must have been jarred by his move to the governor’s mansion at the heart of this sorry city—a far cry from Kykuit, his family’s decadent Hudson Valley estate. The surroundings would prove anathema to aspiring sovereigns. As the (perhaps apocryphal) story goes, when Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands came to visit the new governor, he took her on a convertible tour of the city. But he was so embarrassed for her to gaze upon an ethnic enclave known as the Pastures that he vowed to transform the neighborhood into a monument of grandeur that would rival even Versailles.
But as the musician and historian Lo Faber theorized in his treatise on the plaza, “Rocky’s Last Erection,” Rockefeller had likely been planning the overhaul long before then. The dilettante had once thought “seriously of becoming an architect—possibly a fine one,” per a letter he’d written to his family during college. But in practice, this interest became what “Rocky” called his “edifice complex”: an obsession with building, which had already yielded Rockefeller Center, the United Nations headquarters, and five new campuses for the new state university system. Not long after Rocky began reimagining Albany’s central plaza, he would join up with his brother, David, to raise the World Trade Center.