Historic Piece

Empire State Plaza: Fifty Years on the Albany Skyline

America250 graphic: the Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY — the Corning Tower and agency buildings rising behind the Legislative Office Building, captioned “One of America’s largest concrete government complexes”

The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza (known commonly as the Empire State Plaza, the South Mall, or the Albany Mall) is a complex of state government buildings located in downtown Albany, NY. Built between 1965 and 1976, it houses several departments of the New York State administration and is adjacent to and connected with the historic New York State Capitol, which was built in 1899.

Designed by the architectural firm Harrison & Abramovitz, the complex consists of ten buildings: the Mayor Erastus Corning Tower, the Cultural Education Center, the Robert Abrams Building for Law and Justice, The Legislative Office Building, the Swan Street Building, the “Egg” Performing Arts Center and four Agency office buildings labeled Agency 1 through Agency 4. The Legislative Office Building was the first building to be completed in 1972, and the last was the Egg Performing Arts Center. At 44 stories high, the Corning Tower is the tallest building in New York State outside of New York City.

All the buildings within the Plaza are constructed of steel and reinforced concrete. Each is clad with imported stone, except The Egg, which fully exposes its concrete structure. The buildings sit on a 6-story stone-clad reinforced concrete Main Platform which itself is one of the largest buildings in the world. The platform is supported by 25,000 steel pilings, each driven an average of 70 feet deep. Spanning over one quarter mile, the platform not only supports the complex’s buildings, but also three reflecting pools.

The complex incorporates 8.9 million cubic yards of concrete, clad with 600,000 cubic feet of stone imported from many locations on three continents. Between the pilings and the structural frames of the buildings, over 232,000 tons of steel were used on the project. That is the equivalent of approximately twenty Eiffel Towers!

For fifty years, the Empire State Plaza has stood as the dominant feature of the Albany skyline, and it is all possible thanks to concrete.

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