You know how you always hear the Corning Tower is the tallest building between New York City and Montreal? Well, before the 42-story tower at the Empire State Plaza opened in 1966, the Alfred E. Smith State Office Building held that honor. At 34 stories and 388 feet, it was not only fabulously tall, but when it opened in 1928, it was only 9 feet shorter than Montreal’s tallest, the Royal Bank Building that was completed in the same year. (At the time, the tallest building in New York City was the Woolworth Building; if you’d put the Smith Building on top of the Royal Bank, the Woolworth building would still have had seven feet on them.)
Al Smith was born in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1873. The son of working class parents and the product of Catholic school, Al was a newsboy who had to go to work fulltime as a fishmonger to help support his family when his father died. Witty and personable, he fell in with the Tammany Hall Democratic machine, picking up local political jobs and eventually becoming a member of the Assembly, where he became Speaker in 1913. He ran for Governor in 1918, winning four two-year terms (though not consecutively – the Harding landslide of 1920 put Governor Whitman in the Capitol). Starting in 1924, he took a number of stabs at the presidency, but being a “wet” Catholic from Tammany proved too much to overcome. He died in 1944.
The building wasn’t named for Al Smith until 1946, when another famous also-ran-to-be, Governor Dewey, dedicated the building to his predecessor. Prior to that, it was just the State Office Building. You know, the one where all the state offices were. Once upon a time, it had an observation deck on the 31st floor, but that closed in 1976 when the observation deck of the Tower Building (later the Corning Tower) opened.
