The Haunted House
Peter Elkind’s book Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is a better and more serious book than it seems at first glance. It includes some of the seamy details of Spitzer’s secret life as Client No. 9 of Emperors Club VIP, but not as many as I expected. (It is apparently true that Spitzer once hired three different “escorts” in a single day. It is apparently not true that he kept his calf-length black socks on.)
The book does include a lot about Spitzer’s stellar career as attorney general, his temperamental lack of affinity for the job of governor, and the details of why New York State’s government is even more expensive, gridlocked, and maddening than most. One illustration of that comes in Elkind’s description of the capitol building in Albany, a stone pile I’ve seen many times but was never curious enough to go inside. Now I want to.
The capitol building of New York is the perfect monument to democracy in the Empire State: it was finished scandalously late, ran massively over budget, and is the product of unholy compromise.
A five-story jumble of turrets and towers, the capitol was built on a hill overlooking downtown Albany and the Hudson River, on a site covered with quicksand. It is both grand and grandiose. Construction began in 1867; it took thirty-two years to complete. The original architect was fired eight years in, with just two stories finished, after scandalous cost overruns had exhausted a $4 million budget, prompting a string of investigations and editorial outrage. The new architects didn’t like the Italian Renaissance design, so they built the remaining three stories in Romanesque style instead. Everything about the capitol is massive. It occupies five and a half acres; its granite walls are five feet thick. The vaulted sandstone ceiling in the assembly chamber was the widest ever constructed—until it started collapsing and had to be scrapped. When finally completed in 1899, at a price of $25 million, it was the most expensive government structure ever built—twice the cost of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
The building’s interior is dark and Gothic, filled with long corridors, arched windows, marble columns, tall unmarked doors, even a secret entrance to the governor’s office. It is dominated by three huge, ornate stairways that seem to rise endlessly skyward in unknowable directions, like something out of an Escher lithograph. The most remarkable, known as the “Million Dollar Staircase,” contains 444 steps and took fourteen years to build. It is adorned with scores of faces painstakingly carved in place out of stone. Most are famous: Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Walt Whitman. But the five hundred carvers also memorialized wives and children, animals and random citizens. Some of the images—a cherub and a tiny devil’s head—are tucked in nooks and crannies, visible only with a flashlight. To new arrivals, like Spitzer’s staff, the building seemed unknowable and vaguely mysterious, filled with secrets. Rich Baum, Spitzer’s top deputy, came to call it “the Haunted House.”
