William Clift wants space to be encompassed. In his photos he seeks out a stairwell, a portico, a corner of the Assembly Chamber, the fireplace wall in the Executive Chamber before it was redecorated, the Capitol by night from a distance, the press room on the third floor, a view to the north over three Capitol dormers. He finds beauty not in isolated elements but in the ensemble effect, in the way a given place accumulates furniture, and flags, and a vista, and a perimeter.
His photographs suggest another truth: that the Capitol is a museum not only of stone carving and architecture, but of portrait painting, of political photography, of military artifacts. The Capitol is a rich repository of flags, guns, uniforms, letters, and photos from the Civil War, other wars. In a small cavelike room under the Million-Dollar Staircase, you must handle the photos with white gloves: tintypes of women taken off dead soldiers on Southern battlefields, or photos of Union soldiers taken by Mathew Brady’s studio, or a letter from a wounded soldier to his lieutenant, asking that his buddies write him and yearning from his hospital bed to rejoin the company.
These things are not entirely accessible to the public but await display in a Civil War room or a military museum yet to be created. Some items are on view in corridors of the Capitol: a Confederate doctor’s surgical case alongside his foot artillery sword, blades with two moral edges; and the uniform worn by Colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth, born in Saratoga County, sometime resident of Troy, and the first Union officer to die in the Civil War: shot through the chest by the proprietor of an Alexandria, Virginia, hotel, from whose roof Ellsworth had pulled down the Confederate flag. When President Lincoln heard the news of Ellsworth’s death, he wept.
Now move along. There’s the courtyard, once planned by architect Fuller as a sculpture garden to educate the public about art, but never completed. Now it is half full of a latter-day copper roof that covers the Capitol’s one-story cafeteria, added in 1923. Ventilators, a ladder, the green corrosion of the copper roof, and not much else dominate the dismal, unsightly central core of the great building. There are plans to create an open garden in that courtyard, with fountains and statuary and with access from all sides, and maybe that will happen one day.
We can go upstairs now to the Legislative Correspondents’ room and see how it’s changed in the twenty years since we last used its facilities, and the answer is: not much. What is new is that it’s quiet. You don’t hear typewriters, you don’t even see them, because they’ve been replaced by video display terminals. Photos of certain favored governors line the upper walls of the downstairs part of the room: Teddy Roosevelt, Tom Dewey, Al Smith, Big Bill Sulzer, the only governor to be impeached, and Martin H. Glynn, the Albany Times-Union editor who was Sulzer’s lieutenant governor, and who replaced him.
A young Nelson Rockefeller looks out from the east wall and Dan Barr, who used to report on politics for the Times-Union and who later became a Rockefeller press aide, is having coffee with a visitor on The Shelf, the upstairs portion of the press room that juts out over half the lower room. This is the truly historical section, where the pool and card tables and the beer are kept. And it is where Harry Truman one day played “The Missouri Waltz” on the piano. The boys had a sign made up and sent it to Harry for his signature, and it is there on the piano now. It first read: “Harry Truman Played Here, Oct. 8, 1955.” Harry signed it but inserted the words “the piano” after the word “played,” and added in a footnote: “Just to make plain what was played,” for like everybody else in politics, Harry knew that a twenty-four-hour poker game was a significant element on The Shelf.
Dan Barr was a young reporter in the mid-1950s when he encountered the poker game. Some of the regulars were Jimmy Desmond and Dick Lee of the New York Daily News and Warren Weaver and Doug Dales of The New York Times, Emmett O’Brien of Gannett News Service, and Arvis Chalmers of the Albany Knickerbocker News. Dan knew you couldn’t just sit down and play poker, that you had to be invited. So he watched the game patiently for six months, and then one day Jimmy Desmond looked up and said to him, “Well, kid, you wanna play?”
Dan brought Rockefeller up to the press room one day, his first visit, and the governor was depressed by the dinginess of it. Said Dan: “Nelson told Emmett O’Brien and other old-timers here that he’d renovate the place, extend The Shelf, clean it up, and modernize it.” The cadre of the press corps took this offer under advisement, then told the governor, “No thanks. We want it just the way it is.”
That’s the way it still is, and it’s not bad at all as press rooms go. It looks like a press room, and it feels like a press room, and while there is only a card game maybe once a month nowadays, the stakes are the same as they were in the fifties: a quarter, half a dollar, and a dollar. “Inflation has never hit this place,” Dan Barr said.
In William Clift’s photo of a downstairs corner of the press room, the face of Mario Cuomo stares out at the viewer. Governor Cuomo, the incumbent at this writing, personally oversaw the refurbishing of the Executive Chamber, the most recent of the Capitol’s modern restorations.
Governor Cuomo took us on a tour of the room that, before his tenure, had been called the Red Room, after its red rug and draperies, and was used mainly for press conferences. The sumptuous appointments of the room’s designer, architect Richardson, had been long since replaced with mock-colonial furniture and chandeliers; radiators had blocked the full-length windows; the handsome Philippine mahogany walls had been gouged in numerous places to hang paintings; and a mighty clutter of chairs and lights and wiring for cameras and microphones had overthrown the room’s original purpose: to give dignity and elegance to the office of the chief executive.
Now press conferences are held elsewhere, a replica of the original multicolored floral rug is on the floor, the colonial revival, the red decor and the radiators are all gone, and the walls have been patched, polished, and stripped of paintings. Will the paintings go back up?
“Only if I lose the election,” said the governor, who prefers mahogany to bad portraiture.
The room looks today very like it did when Governor Alonzo B. Cornell entered it for the first time on September 30, 1881: luxurious, tasteful, aesthetically pleasing. It is now used for ceremonial occasions, visitors come through on tours, and the governor paces in it. He does not use the eight-and-a-half-by-five-foot desk that Grover Cleveland and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt used when they governed the state. “If I sat at it,” the governor said, “the newspapers would say I’ve got a Benito Mussolini complex.” He works in a smaller office, adjacent to the chamber, using a smaller desk that once belonged to F.D.R.
What does the governor think about such rooms, about the Capitol itself, and what it stands for?
“I love it,” he said, and he pointed to the splendid fireplace that, as he explains to visiting schoolchildren, used to be the only source of heat in the chamber.
“Then I take the kids to the window and have them look out at the modern South Mall, so different from all this old way of life here, and I tell them that there were human beings here a hundred years ago, and there’ll be human beings here a hundred years from now, and that we’re only part of a continuum.
“I feel like a visitor here myself,” the governor went on, “and the more time you spend on history, the more you feel that way. I’m very leery about changing anything or spoiling anything. We have to preserve things for generations that haven’t been born yet, and being in this room makes you think that kind of thought.”
The great structures of American political history were designed to dominate the communities that gave them power, their domes and towers thrusting upward to the heavens with the message that the law must be exalted. Albany’s Capitol was to have a tower, but all designs proved either unwieldy or excessive, and it was never built. Even without it the building has dominated the city, and the state, for a century.
The sleek towers of its new neighbor, the South Mall, more formally known as the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, n
ow rise higher, but the Capitol is not diminished. It remains a giant among buildings, radiating the complex and multiple meanings of lawmaking, political debate, and the historical record of it all. It looms before us at the top of State Street hill like Franz Kafka’s castle, and like that remarkable literary creation, it suggests a quest for grace, not by the individual in this case, but by the community.
Those long years of building the Capitol, the myriad restorations, the eternal tinkering with it, and the indefatigable will to finish the unfinishable, all bespeak a communal need to perfect a work of art: to embody meaning that may be venerated now and forever. The Capitol is, no doubt about it, an imperfect work of art, but it is nevertheless a very great one.
1986
* This essay was written as a companion piece to a book of photographs of the Capitol by Dan Weeks, Stephen Shore, Judith Turner, and William Clift.
Talking to the High Court
When Chief Judge Sol Wachtler asked me to speak here he suggested I might create a bridge between this city and this court.* “Those of us who have been coming to Albany for the last century to serve on our state’s highest tribunal,” he wrote, “have come to love the city as our own.”
Albany has actually been home to the high court for more than three and a half centuries, beginning in the era of the Patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, whose feudal manor of Rensselaerswyck encompassed a million acres of the land that surrounds us here. In 1635 the Patroon appointed a Schout, who was sheriff, district attorney and high judge all in one, and empowered him to choose three Schepens, or aldermen of a sort, to administer government and justice. None were trained in law, so the Patroon sent them a book, Freedoms of the Patroons and Colonies, and cleverly noted to his judges that “those who cannot read shall immediately have the same read to them by others.” The Patroon later sent two more volumes—Damhouwer on criminal procedure, and the Ars Notariatus, thus establishing the first law library in this old, old place of law and justice.
The seat of this new legal power was a shingled wooden building inside the walls of Fort Orange, at what’s now the foot of Madison Avenue. The courtroom was seventeen feet long and ten feet wide, with judges’ chambers on the second floor, to which the Schout and the Schepens adjourned by climbing up a ladder through a trapdoor. This is when people first began to refer to this as the high court.
The court of Rensselaerswyck was so powerful that for years it resisted the efforts of the director general of the whole New Netherland colony, Peter Stuyvesant, to impose his authority here. The Schout of Rensselaerswyck, an arrogant fellow named Brandt van Schlictenhorst, went so far as to tear up all the law ordinances Stuyvesant ordered him to publish. One ordinance regulated a tax on tap beer, and some among us may recognize that this resistance to authority in matters of beer has been handed down to us in Albany, most notably during Prohibition, when the Albany political machine, in defiance of federal law, ran its own breweries.
Stuyvesant finally arrested van Schlictenhorst, evicted his court and created a new one, the Court of Fort Orange and Beverwyck, the oldest court in the state—a year older than the first New York City court. This court sat in a building called the Stadt Huys at the foot of Hudson Avenue, and it was here in the 1680s that Albany County, known as the Mother of Counties because of its enormous size, was created and subdivided—in 1683; and where in 1686 the city of Albany received its charter from Governor Thomas Dongan. That golden decade of the 1680s will also be remembered for other reasons—as the time when the first game of pool, and also the first peanut, were introduced to Albany.
The court outgrew the old Stadt Huys and a new one was built about 1743. And only Faneuil Hall in Boston, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, could ever match it for historical significance; for here in 1754 was held the first Colonial Congress, with Benjamin Franklin presiding; and from its steps on July 19, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read to the Continental army troops and the citizens of Albany.
Here also justice was served in a most expeditious and handy way. Convicted felons were taken out in front of the Stadt Huys and whipped; and convicted murderers were taken to the basement and hanged. In time the place was called the Common Gaol & City & County Hall, and justice was carried on here until 1808 when the county and city, and the state, all moved their offices to the new Capitol—we now call it the old Capitol—which stood just a bit southeast of where the present Capitol stands.
That year of the big move was also the year of the first accurate survey of a canal route between the Hudson River at Albany and Lake Erie. It was when Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, renamed the North River, docked here for her second season on the river; and when Albany theatergoers saw their first tigers—a male and female from Asia, down at the Thespian Hotel hall on North Pearl Street.
The court continued its work in the old Capitol until 1821, when a constitutional convention created the predecessor of this court—the Court for the Trial of Impeachments, and the Correction of Errors. But the Court of Errors was unwieldy with thirty-seven members, most of them politicians who knew or cared little about the law, and who voted on appeals without consulting either lawbooks or the few genuine judges who served on the court.
Judge Francis Bergan, in his book on this court, quotes the great New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley as writing of the “confessedly deplorable state of our higher courts of justice, choked with litigation which lingers from year to year and ruins clients by its enormous expensiveness without bringing their suits to a conclusion.”
The population growth in the country at this time was fantastic, the Germans and the Irish coming in by the hundreds of thousands annually, and Albany felt it keenly, eventually becoming a city dominated by the Irish.
Yet the courts were constricting life at a time when the world was changing and expanding radically. In 1847, for instance, down at the Delavan House, the fancy hotel that stood where Fleet Plaza is today, a man named W. C. Bull read aloud the first telegraphic message sent by sound, an achievement noted all over the world. Albany was so impressed that it immediately opened direct communication with distant lands, the first being St. Louis, Missouri.
Such major changes in the society often seemed prophetic of divine anger to some who gave allegiance to the highest court of all. William Miller of Pittsfield founded a sect called the Millerites, and they predicted that 1843 would see the Second Coming of Christ. The Millerites grieved when Christ didn’t turn up, but they recalculated and said he was really due in 1844. When he didn’t show up then either they decided the world would end November 9, 1847.
Wrong again. The world kept going, including the New York State Legislature, which passed the Judiciary Act of 1847, creating this—the highest court of this state. The court has gone through many wrenchings, expansions and transformations in the years since then. In 1883 it moved into an elegant new courtroom in the present-day Capitol, and stayed there until 1916, when it began its move to this extraordinary building.
There are more connections to be made between the court and the city, more bridges to be built, but there is no time today to build them. And so I’d like to close with the remarks of two men, both sometime visitors to Albany, both close observers of our system of justice in this country. The first is Finley Peter Dunne, the Irish writer, who was well aware that justice eluded many of the Irish a hundred years ago, and who had this to say: “I tell ya, Hogan’s right when he says ‘Justice is blind.’ Blind she is, and deef—and dumb—and has a wooden leg.”
And then Daniel Webster, the great American statesman whose whole life was government and law. “Justice,” he said “is the greatest interest of man on earth.”
I’m sure I speak for multitudes past and present when I say that we are proud this exalted court exists in our midst, but more than that: we are privileged beyond measure that it exists at all.
1986
* The New York State Court of Appeals.
Jody Bolden or Bobby Henderson:
Either Way the Music Was Great
“I made up my mind,” Jody Bolden was saying, “that when I got down there I’d be relaxed and I wouldn’t even think commercial. I thought of all the people who liked my music and I had them in mind, and not that it was gonna sell a million copies. And I had a beautiful piano to make it on and so I was more relaxed than any record session I was ever in. And for people I knew, I just wanted to play good songs, and we picked out the relaxin’ tunes.”
Jody Bolden, one of the very highly regarded pianists of the jazz age, but one whose fame was always way behind his talent, was sitting up in his bed at Albany Medical Center, talking about a major event in his life—the new record due for release before the year is out.
The record is called Home in the Clouds, the title of a tune Jody wrote in collaboration with Kaye Parker somewhere between 1927 and 1929 at Benny Carter’s club in New York. Anybody who has ever heard Jody play piano for more than a few hours has probably heard the tune at least once, heard him play it and sing
When the man in the moon
scatters silver over the sky,
We will hum any tune, make each
song a sweet lullaby.…
The record is a rare development, for as anyone connected with music will tell you, the market today is all rock music, and jazz is just not very commercial anymore. But the record will be issued anyway, on the Halcyon Label, apt name, a record firm owned by Marian McPartland, herself a highly regarded jazz pianist.
But the taping was a product of the devotion of two longtime jazz fans—John Hammond, now director of talent acquisition for CBS, and Hank O’Neal, a federal employee who first heard of Jody in 1957 when he was given a copy of A Night at Count Basie’s.
Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction Page 47
