ALBANY — The once-quiet park that surrounds the imposing eastern entrance to the New York Capitol is a mess, strewn with construction equipment, portable toilets, massive stones both plain and ornately carved, a temporary workshed and a plethora of safety gear.
That impressive staircase, which almost looks like it’s holding the state Capitol up on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, is also a mess; its balustrades are shaved off, a whole span of stairs is missing to expose the brick underlayer, and black safety netting holds up pieces of the intricate carving that are at risk of falling off.
This is all because the state, through its Office of General Services, has undertaken a yearslong, multi-million dollar project to restore the major structural problems that have plagued the granite 77-step staircase for nearly the entirety of its existence. It’s a massive project, wrapping almost entirely around the state Capitol.
“It’s almost a repair that involves everything at grade level, it wraps around one of the most historic and prominent buildings in one of the oldest cities in America,” said Jeanette M. Moy, commissioner of the state Office of General Services. Moy and OGS gave the Watertown Daily Times an exclusive, behind-the-fence look at the work to restore the staircase at the end of June.
Work started late last year, with an allotment of $72.3 million from the state budget to restore the stairs. They’ve been closed to the public for more than 10 years, with officials worried about unsafe steps, weak railings and crumbling stonework as well as building security.
State Republicans have made that price tag, of nearly $930,000 per step, a point of attack on state Democrats and the governor in recent weeks. As the state budget balloons and voters continually complain about how expensive everyday living has become, the GOP, including gubernatorial candidate Bruce R. Blakeman, argue that cost is too high and a waste of taxpayer money.
But Moy and Gov. Kathy Hochul brush off those criticisms. They point out that the project has been on the state’s roster of things that need to be addressed for many decades now. Records first indicate a problem in 1924 and repairs were first undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s, but degradation of the structure has been apparent since then.
Moy pointed out that the project has to fit certain requirements, including maintaining the appearance of the stairs and as much of the original material as possible because it’s a recognized historic building.
She also pointed out that the project entails a complete re-imagining of the park that surrounds the stairs, known as East Capitol Park.
“This entire East Capitol Park also has to be restored,” she said. “It’s a construction site right now, but we’re looking at historic renderings to bring it back to not just what you might have seen two years ago, but what you might have seen 20 years ago, a hundred years ago.”
Moy said that once completed, officials are expecting nearly 500,000 visitors to the park, not counting the hundreds of thousands of visits paid per year to the Capitol complex around it.
Moy said the work to restore the staircase has been painstaking, with officials working with contractors from around the state and country. Ornate carvings of animals, people and abstract items are dotted throughout the structure, many with visible damage after years of exposure to upstate New York weather and a century of poor drainage. Expert masons are working on the site to repair the damaged carvings in a purpose-built shed, meant to allow the work to go on uninterrupted through cold winters.
Water damage has been one of the biggest complications for the project, Moy said. Water from the massive Capitol building would fall down between the building and the stairs, flowing under a raised driveway that goes under and between the steps and the building.
“You could actually hear water running sometimes, standing under the arch,” Moy said.
Evidence of the shifting structure can be seen in an uneven archway, with one half of the archway visibly lower than its neighbors. Moy said crumbling stonework on the archway has damaged at least one vehicle underneath.
“Thankfully, nobody has been hit,” she said.
A large undercroft area beneath the bulk of the steps, which served mainly as storage for building materials from the Capitol project, was rife with evidence of water damage and subsidence, Moy said. A mid-century effort to shore the staircase up with temporary supports has started to fail, and visible cracks and disintegration of those supports will have to be addressed.
Closer to the surface, Moy said the builders’ decision to use a mix of bluestone and granite to support the steps on top of the brick sublayer proved to be a disaster. The bluestone is cracking faster than the granite, which left massive areas of the staircase uneven and prone to shifting as the base crumbled unevenly.
And on top of the steps, Moy said the railings that ran along either side of the steps had come loose. Another mid-century repair attempted to fix the problem with a special epoxy, described as “space age” at the time.
“It was not appropriate for this use, and it actually made it much harder to take the staircase apart, we had to be much more careful to avoid damaging the stone,” Moy said.
A rotating team of at least 30 crew members, specialized in everything from general contracting to historic masonry repair, will work on-site for the next few years, pulling the staircase apart piece by piece, cataloging each and making the necessary spot repairs. Then, the reconstruction will begin. The base structure will be stabilized with the windows to the undercroft touched up, and new step supports will be laid before each stone piece is put back into place. A series of bronze light fixtures that have been sent to a specialist for restoration will be put back into place with LED lamps installed.
Then officials will turn their attention to the park itself, making those renovations to bring it back to an older iteration. Moy and OGS say the project will be finished by 2029, park included.
“There’s a lot of thoughtfulness we’re putting into this work, we take it very seriously and we look forward to giving it back to the people of Albany,” Moy said.
See the NNY Capitol Report video on YouTube for more details on the renovation at tinyurl.com/CapitolRenovations