SED offers architectural tours to honor building’s 100th year |
On Board Online • October 15, 2012
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior Writer
The State Education Department will mark the centennial of its grand Albany headquarters with guided tours offering a rare look inside the magnificent Beaux Arts building dedicated in October 1912.
Open houses are scheduled for Friday, Oct. 19, and Saturday, Oct. 20, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 21, from noon to 4 p.m. Visitors may sign up in advance for scheduled tours, which begin during the open house days and are expected to continue through December, by following a link on the centennial portion of SED’s website, http://usny.nysed.gov/centennial/.
On Board got a sneak peak in a tour with George Webb, who oversaw a painstaking restoration of the building as the department’s director of facilities and building operations.
Each detail reflects the vision articulated by Andrew Sloan Draper, New York’s first education commissioner, Webb explained.
“The building makes a statement,” said Webb, who retired in 2009. “Draper’s vision is: the building has to tell a story, it has to underscore the importance of education in New York State. You can’t walk around here and not be reminded of that point.”
The theme first appears on the approach to the main entrance on Washington Avenue. Life-size bronze figures of school children encircle the bases of two enormous light fixtures called “electroliers.” Sculptor Charles Keck of New York City also created a large bas relief medallion depicting a woman reading with two children for the space above the front doors.
Albany-born artist Will H. Low painted 32 classically- themed mural panels for the grand second-floor library rotunda and attached corridors. Several of the panels juxtapose figures from Greek mythology – Theseus, Icarus and Prometheus, to name a few – with modern elements, including a line of telegraph poles, a flying bi-plane and a truss arch railroad bridge.
“Every place you turn, the details are all pointing to the same thing,” Webb said.
Draper had declared that a structure built to house the newly unified education department should stand as a testament to the high value placed on learning, cultural enlightenment and intellectual life in New York.
In a speech 100 years ago at the ceremony celebrating the completion of the $4 million project, Draper praised the realization of that goal. He said: “This building recognizes the fact that the culture of the soul is a work which the state is not only to consent to and encourage, but which it is to aid and promote.”
To carry out Draper’s vision, state leaders turned in 1907 to Paris-trained architect Henry Hornbostel of New York City. His winning proposal, which was among 63 submitted to a design competition, was selected for the dignified aura communicated by its neo-classical design and majestic scale. The 590-foot-long line of 90-foot-tall marble pillars along the front still is believed to be the longest colonnade in the world.
The R.T. Ford Company of Rochester broke ground for the Education Building in July 1908.
But in a cruel twist, the Education Building was robbed of some of its most significant intended contents just a year and a half before it opened. A fire that roared through the state Capitol, then the home of the State Library, in March 1911 consumed a heartbreaking number of irreplaceable historic volumes and artifacts.
If the project had been on time for the scheduled opening in January 1911, the library’s contents would already have been secured in storage areas designed to be virtually fireproof.
Webb credits Draper’s obsessive concern with safeguarding documents for the survival of a handful of New York’s greatest treasures. The commissioner had insisted that some items of high historic significance, including what is now the only surviving copy of the Emancipation Proclamation bearing President Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting and a draft of President George Washington’s Farewell Address, be placed in a separate vault in the Capitol. That protected them long enough to be rescued.
When the Education Building opened in 1912, it was the world’s first government building dedicated solely to education. As the department’s responsibilities and staff grew, however, it lacked sufficient office space. In 1960, a 10-floor office annex – of no particular architectural distinction – was added to the rear at a cost of $5 million.
The State Museum and State Library moved to the Cultural Education Building at the south end of the Empire State Plaza in the late 1970s, and within a few years, talk of restoring the original building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, began in earnest.
Webb and his longtime assistant director, Bill Winchester, oversaw the historic restoration and the modernization of electrical and mechanical systems for the duration of the project, from 1987 to 2001, even as they also tended to the more routine aspects of their jobs in other state-owned buildings.
Though they’re now retired, Webb and Winchester delight in returning to the old building to share their enthusiasm with visitors and will lead tours during the centennial celebration. Their knowledge of the building’s art, architecture and electric and mechanical systems is unmatched, department officials say.
“We’re both very proud to have been involved in this,” said Webb.
“Our heart and soul is in this building,” said Winchester.
For more photos, see NYSSBA’s Facebook page.