Albany Bicentennial Tablet No. 47 – Old Capitol

Here is the last of the several bicentennial tablets that were not recorded by the official Bicentennial Committee in 1886. Placed on the grounds of the new east Capitol Park not many years after the building it celebrates was demolished in 1883, our final tablet somehow survived all these years.

No. 47, “Old Capitol” – “Site of main entrance to old capitol, erected 1806. Gen. Lafayette was received here, 1824. The remains of President Lincoln and many other prominent men, lay in state here. The State library was adjoining and with Capitol, Demolished 1883. Fronting on this park stood Congress Hall, famous for its distinguished guests. Daniel Webster addressed the citizens from its steps, 1844.”

The First Capitol Building

As C.R. Roseberry wrote in “Capitol Story,” Albany became the state capital almost by accident. After the colonial legislature abandoned New York during the revolution, it met in various places around the Hudson Valley. When in Albany, the legislature met in the old Stadt Huys, the city hall, on Broadway. Frederic G. Mather wrote in Harper’s Weekly that “This dingy yellow brick building – without positive record as to its origin – had long been used as a public hall, court-house, and jail. In front of it stood the pillory and whipping-post; while within its walls had been confined many a prisoner for debt, many a British sympathizer, and many a convict under sentence of death for burglary, incendiarism, or the passing of counterfeit Spanish dollars.”

To the extent that there’s any information about the old Stadt Huys (or Huis, take your pick), we included it when we wrote about Tablet No. 2, Municipal.

In 1797, the Legislature passed a bill to erect a public building for storage of “state records, books, papers, and other things,” but it wasn’t until 1804 that there was a move to build a “state house,” when the city of Albany offered to donate land on the public square and share some of the cost in exchange for some use of the building. The law enacted, according to Mather, provided that the state would pay $10,000 toward the building, the city and county of Albany would provide $6000, and that lotteries would raise $12,000. Mather wrote that the Stadt Huys was sold for $17,200, with that money also applying to the new construction.

Philip Hooker was engaged as the architect. The Albany resident was already having great success in his field, and for decades the look of the city could largely be attributed to him, making it all the more tragic and inexplicable that only two of Hooker’s buildings survive in Albany – the First Church, and the old Albany Academy. (The facade of his New York State Bank has also survived, after a fashion.) Construction began and the new cornerstone was laid April 23, 1806; that cornerstone survives, by the way, on the fourth floor of the “new” Capitol’s Great Western Staircase.

The building was occupied in the summer of 1809 and completed by the end of that year, at which time the Legislature designated that it “shall hereafter be known as the Capitol.” While the building was designated as the Capitol of the state, the city of Albany wasn’t officially designated as the capital city until 1971 when, according to C.R. Roseberry, Assemblyman Charles Henderson of Hornell discovered there had never been an official act of the Legislature.

Ultimately, the building cost about $111,000, with the state paying about $74,000, the city about $34,000, and the county $3,000. By the way, the commissioners named on the cornerstone all received a percentage of the costs for their efforts.

Harper’s Weekly gave a description of the interior, albeit at the time when the building was being demolished:

In front the sombre walls of Nyack freestone are relieved by window trimmings and an Ionic portico . . . of grey marble from the Berkshire Hills . . . the forty-foot columns are merely veneers of marble upon piers of brick, and . . . they have been reeded, instead of fluted, in order to make the deception more easy. The entablature of this portico of great pretensions is of wood, and the pediment . . . is of the same ignoble material. The “acroteria” which seem to promise so much have never held the statues for which they waited so long, while the apex of the pediment supports an urn, also wooden, and totally innocent of decoration . . . within the round-topped doorway [under this portico] was the imposing hall or vestibule which offered an open space of fifty-eight feet long and forty feet wide . . . [it featured a] double row of Etruscan columns . . . upon the broad landing of the stairway.

Also at the time of the building’s demise, Mather wrote somewhat critically of the Capitol’s looks, but at least in part blamed failure to follow Hooker’s original plan:

“Whether the architecture is correct or not, let others dispute. It was orthodox enough when it was built. We may interest ourselves in the quaintly carved doorways upon the north and south sides, the strangely proportioned round-topped windows in the story above, the mural ornaments with flowers and fruits still one story higher, and the half-moon windows in the gables which overlook all these specimens of stone-work handed down from a day when carving was in its infancy on this side of the Atlantic. The sun-dial upon the southeast corner must claim our notice, the weather-beaten and storm-eaten bequest of a stone-cutter to the State when Simeon DeWitt was Surveyor-General, in 1823.”

In “A Neat Plain Modern Stile: Philip Hooker and His Contemporaries,” W. Richard Wheeler provided plans of the two main stories of the Capitol:

Wheeler wrote that “Hooker’s intention appears to have been to address the public square to the east of the building with a facade whose scale was worthy of the space it fronted upon and which made an impression from a distance. The east elevation framed the view up State Street and was visible down to the banks of the Hudson River . . . Unfortunately, the budget seems to have dictated a sense of economy in the treatment of the remaining elevations.” Wheeler wrote that the Capitol building underwent extensive improvements in 1818, likely to Hooker’s design, but that the addition of the State Library building in 1854 as well as other modifications during that period changed much of the interior design.

The City and County of Albany both sold their rights to the building in 1831, and their courts and offices moved to the new City Hall in 1832, resulting in some rearrangements within the Capitol, the Adjutant-General taking a corner room directly opposite the Executive Chamber, and the Senate moving to the front room in the upper story that was 50 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 22 feet high.

Albany Times-Union columnist “DeWitt Schuyler,” writing in 1928, said that the Capitol and its park were “enclosed in a high iron picket fence, resting in a base of white marble. In time the marble deteriorated and the fence was removed. So soft became the stone that with slate pencils or nails, boys would dig into it, crumbling it into particles about the size of grains of granulated sugar.”

Almost from the start, the building was simply too small for even the modest reach of early 19th century state government, and the departure of the city and county in 1832 didn’t resolve those problems. Roseberry wrote that “Even with the City having moved out, expanding State activities stretched its seams. The chambers were ill-ventilated. Committees were named to study their shortcomings. One reported that the legislators habitually complained of dizziness caused by poor quality air.” There were continued improvements throughout the years though, and even in the later years there were reports that the building was generally being kept up.

In 1854, a separate State Library building was built, facing State Street directly behind and connected to the Capitol. That freed up some space, but not enough. During the Civil War, the state’s role was substantial, and the lack of space became a pressing need. Albany’s John Van Schaick Lansing Pruyn, chair of the Senate committee on public buildings, as well as Chancellor of the Board of Regents and counsel of the New York Central Railroad, started pushing for a new capitol building. The Senate authorized the purchase of the properties on State Street from the Capitol to Hawk Street, and those purchases were made, according to Roseberry, prior to any announcement of a new building. Pruyn fronted the money for those purchases. In August 1863, Pruyn advertised for architects to submit designs for a new capitol. Those first designs weren’t acted on, but the momentum was building.

A New Capitol Means We Don’t Need The Old Capitol

Pruyn also began looking into purchasing Congress Hall, the hotel that was nearly as important a legislative meeting place as the Capitol itself. It was on Park Place and Washington Avenue. That would give the planners land clear from State to Washington Avenue to work with.

A bill authorizing the erection of a new capitol was introduced at the start of 1865, part of a legislative deal that also created Cornell University as part of the Morrill Act Land Grant. The Legislature went through some gyrations, pretending to consider whether the capitol could be located elsewhere in the state, which led the city of Albany to offer to purchase the Congress Hall block and any other lands required.

Ultimately, the Congress Hall location would not be overlain by the new construction, though it was needed for construction staging and the eventual park. The proprietor of the hotel was Adam Blake, Albany’s most prominent Black businessman. The adopted son of a slave held by (and eventually released by) the last Patroon, Stephen Van Rensselaer, Adam Blake Jr. was already a successful restaurateur who took charge of Congress Hall early in 1865, taking a somewhat shabby property and restoring it to elegance, and enlarging it into three adjacent residences on Park Place. But Blake was the lessee, not the owner of the property, and the city made good on its pledge to purchase the land and conveyed it to the State in October 1865. Nevertheless, Blake’s lease was continued until such time as the property was actually needed – and wasn’t terminated until Congress Hall was demolished in 1878. At that time, Blake was in a position to build a brand new hotel on North Pearl Street, the Kenmore, which still stands. (Much more on the remarkable Adam Blake can be found at this Friends of Albany History post by Julie O’Connor.)

The new Capitol was under construction for 32 years, beginning in 1867, so it was a little while before the old Capitol would be considered expendable. It wasn’t until 1879 that the new Capitol was partially ready for occupancy, with the Legislature moving first followed by the Governor and other state departments. Schuyler wrote,

“It was in the old Capitol that the remains of Abraham Lincoln laid in state when they were brought to this city on their way to Springfield, Ill., after his assassination. Men prominent in statesmanship and politics, leading members of the bar, persons eminent in public life and who took a leading part in making the history of New York state during three-quarters of a century carried on their activities in that old structure. It was there that Governor Clinton conducted his Erie canal campaign to successful culmination. It was there that the multitudinous work of the state in connection with the Civil war was done. There ‘Boss’ Tweed held forth in the Senate in the day of his political power . . . To the northwest of this structure Congress hall was located, a hotel famous before its destruction to make way for the new Capitol.”

The old Capitol continued to be used for various activities including circuit courts and auction activities for several years, but its end finally came in 1883. In all the coverage we found of the demolition, there was not a mention of the loss of yet another structure by Philip Hooker.

Demolition

The Albany Journal reported on July 25, 1883, that a single bid had been received and accepted for the demolition of the old Capitol building. Local builder and real estate magnate James W. Eaton paid $1,000 for the remains of the building. “This firm is understood to have purchased the property for the purpose of using the material in the construction of the new Normal school, at the request of the trustees.” The Normal school, forerunner of the State University at Albany, was constructing a new building at Willett Street at the time; that burned in 1906 and is now the site of The Willett Apartments building.

It was also said that many other buildings benefited from the recovered stone and wood from the old Capitol. Times-Union columnist Edgar S. Van Olinda in 1941 reported, “The stone and wood of the old Capitol were used all over Albany in the building of new houses. Dr. Cox had it used when he built the house at 276 State street for his daughter, Mrs. Fred Harris.” (But Van Olinda, who was born in 1884, also wrote that “I can remember the old Capitol quite distinctly. It was an imposing building for its time and was torn down in 1880.” So, maybe take his musings with a grain of salt.)

Eaton had to take down the wooden statue of Themis (justice) that stood atop the Capitol dome by cutting a hole in the roof, lowering the statue into the building with the help of William Dowsett, a rigger on the new Capitol, according to an article in the Albany Journal. Themis was, according to Roseberry, sculpted by John Dixey, a replica of the statue had made in 1815 for New York’s city hall. (Roseberry asserts that Themis tumbled to the ground in a thunderstorm shortly before the demolition, but the Journal article contradicts that account.)

Eaton also removed the sundial that was placed there by order of the City Council in 1822. In later years columnists asked about the whereabouts of both these famous items, with no definitive answers forthcoming. The sundial was an odd creation that appears to have attached to the corner of the building. Themis was made of wood, so her survival through the years was by no means assured.

DeWitt Schuyler (whose pen name that was, we don’t know) said the sundial was “the production of a man named Ferguson, who attempted to reproduce the sun dial pictured by a noted Scotchman of the day. In spite of the fact that the work was somewhat crude and never completed, Simeon DeWitt, who in 1823 was surveyor general and a commissioner of the Capitol, liked the dial, and consented to have it placed”on the southeast corner of the building; by resolution of the Common Council, the city paid the expense of $15. Schuyler wrote that by the time the Capitol was demolished, the sundial had “succumbed almost entirely to the elements, and was but a ragged remnant of its former design.”

Extreme Detail

For fans of extreme detail, we below include a description from Horatio Gates Spafford’s 1813 Gazetteer of the State of New-York, written when the first Capitol was new.

Among the public buildings, the Capitol challenges distinguished attention. This building stands at the head of State-street. adjoining the public square, and on an elevation of 130 feet above the level of the Hudson. It is a substantial stone building, faced with free-stone taken from the brown sand-stone quarries on the Hudson below the Highlands. The east front, facing State-Street, is 90 feet in length; the north, 115 feet; the walls are 50 feet high, consisting of 2 stories, and a basement story of 10 feet. The east front is adorned with a portico of the Ionic order, tetrastyle; the columns, 4 in number, are each 3 feet 8 inches in diameter, 33 feet in height, exclusive of the entablature which supports an angular pediment, in the tympanum of which is to be placed the Arms of the State. The columns, pilasters, and decorations of the door and windows, are of white or grey marble, from Berkshire county in Massachusetts. The north and south fronts have each a pediment of 65 feet base, and the doors are decorated with columns and angular pediments of free-stone. The ascent to the hall at the east or principal front, is by 15 stone steps, 48 feet in length. This hall is 58 feet in length, 40 feet in width, and 16 in height, the ceiling of which is supported by a double row of reeded columns; the doors are finished with pilasters and open pediments; the floor vaulted, and laid with squares of Italian marble, diagonally, chequered with white and grey. From this hall, the first door on the right hand opens to the Common Council Chamber of the Corporation of Albany; opposite this, on the left, is a room for the Council of Revision. On the right at the W. end of the hall you enter the Assembly-Chamber, which is 56 feet long, 50 wide, and 28 feet in height. The Speaker’s seat is in the centre of the longest side, and the seats and tables for the members are arranged in front of it, in a semi-circular form. It has a gallery opposite the Speaker’s seat, supported by 8 antique fluted Ionic columns; the frieze, cornice, and ceiling-piece (18 feet diameter) are richly ornamented in Stucco. From this hall, on the left, you are conducted to the Senate-Chamber, 50 feet long, 28 wide, and 28 feet high*, finished much in the same style as the Assembly-Chamber. In the furniture of these rooms, with that of the Council of Revision, there is a liberal display of public munificence, and the American Eagle assumes an Imperial splendor. There are 2 other rooms on this floor adjoining those first mentioned, which are occupied as lobbies to accommodate the members of the Legislature.

From the west end, in the centre of the hall, you ascend a staircase that turns to the right and left leading to the Galleries of the Senate and Assembly-Chambers, and also to the Supreme Court room, which is immediately over the hall; its dimensions are 50 feet in length, 40 in breadth, and 22 in height. This room is handsomely ornamented in Stucco. An entresole or mezzanine story, on each side of the Court room, contains 4 rooms for Jurors and the uses of the Courts.

The attic story contains a Mayor’s Court room, a room for the Society of Arts, and 2 other rooms yet unappropriated. This building is roofed with a double-hip, or pyramidal form, upon the centre of which is erected a circular cupola 20 feet diameter, covered with a domical roof, supported by 8 insulated columns of the Ionic order, and contains a small bell for the use of the courts. The centre of the dome sustains a pedestal, on which is placed Themis, facing State-street, a carved figure in wood of 11 feet in height, holding a sword in her right hand, and a balance in her left. The whole cost of the building, 115,000 dollars; and I regret to say that the roof is covered with pine instead of slate, with which the state abounds, and of an excellent quality.

*This violation of architectural proportions, is a deviation from the design of the Architect, Mr. Philip H. Hooker, of this city, whose abilities and correctness in the line of his profession are universally acknowledged.