60 State Street

The building is Beaux-Art, designed in the late 19^th century by architects York and Sawyer from New York City. The atria is a transforming place, so wide and high, broad and powerful, a grand hall of human dreams and achievement, right here in Albany. Right here on the short street of power Downtown, between the proud D&H Building at the foot to the New York State Capitol crowning the hill, it presents a façade of what Albany fails to achieve: a downtown that pays beautiful homage to its history, a living museum of old New York, its merchants and scamps, its sailors, its cobblestones, its government and money, its backroom deals and its endless, timeless river. It was an appropriate place to be hosting BUILT: Albany’s Architecture Through Artists’ Eyes, a fundraising gala for a hoary nonprofit, Historic Albany. On the old walls and on decorative presentation tables were models of tribute and idealism, photos of back street decay, drawings of contradictions and contrasts, there was bitterness, and blind love, and wistful affection, and political commentary in the form of two- and three-dimensional art, a display of the visionaries and judges, the engineers and wizards of our little art world. And there were people, hundreds of them, some of the area’s most well-heeled patronesses, some of the area’s fashionably famous artists, others historians with a passion for old buildings in need of preservation and a yearning for re-use and rejuvenation. The crowd was so genuine (mostly), the art so inventive and smart and provocative, and 60 State Street, larger-than-life larger-than-Albany York and Sawyer masterpiece, a haven of wishful thinkers, and their grand vision of what, alas, Albany could have been.