ContentsNelson (intro)ErieAlbanyThe PlazaRocky’s last… edificeThe GutDinnerNelson (intro)NELSON ROCKEFELLER was a megalomaniac. This much was clear to me as soon as I stepped foot in Albany, New York State’s capital and a living, breathing testament to the failures of American governance in the latter half of the 20th century. Over the course of his long, influential career in national, New York State, and New York City politics, Nelson treated the world like a little lego set. He would swoop in from the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills to schmooze with Latin American oil tycoons, amass and sell enormous collections of art, or spearhead statewide urban renewal in New York with little accountability or personal consequence.I took a road trip around New York last week, beginning in Albany and ending in Binghamton. The first “thing” I saw was the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, which casts long shadows over the Hudson Valley with its collection of oppressive modernist towers. Conceived of and executed by Governor Nelson in a fanatical, doomed fit of passion and self-indulgence in the late 1960s, The Plaza cuts a violent figure into the skyline. Looking up at its towers, which are perched on an obscene expanse of concrete in the center of Albany, you are confronted with Nelson’s cynical vision for urban life from anywhere in the city. Residents of Albany, one of the poorest cities in the country, must negotiate their day-to-day living under the auspices of 600,000 cubic feet of stone that tells them in no uncertain terms: “we’re not here to help.”Through positions in the FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations, as well as a seemingly interminable stint as New York State Governor and three years as Gerald Ford’s Vice President, Nelson became the face of the dynastic Northeastern Liberal Republican. The thing about that political class — more broadly described as the Eastern Establishment — is that they don’t really exist anymore. They used the force of the post-war New Deal state to spend profligate sums of money on shortsighted megaprojects while whittling away state power, identifying unsustainable public spending (mostly their own) and poor minorities (mostly their champions) as the culprits for a rapidly unraveling social fabric. They mostly passed before getting to see their ideology trimmed of any lingering noblesse oblige in favor of a leaner, cruder individualism oriented around hyperaccumulation rather than, say, self-edification.From my first step into Albany’s South End neighborhood, I understood that the idea of “negotiation” with and under the Powers That Be would frame my trip. Upstate New York offers a stage for the historical negotiations that define urban America, beginning as far back as North America’s first settlement by Europeans and extending into the forever wars of the 21st Century. The fate of central Albany was settled by negotiation: residents of “The Gut” pleaded with Nelson’s state government and its army to protest the demolition of their neighborhood to make way for The Plaza. They lost. These negotiations are better understood as pleas for the spoils of a done deal: if the modern history of New York begins with the wrenching of a pre-market world into the cold rationalism of a market-based economy, these are the subsequent conversations, thrashings, and revolutions of affected parties.In this process of negotiation, ancient, pre-European worlds collided with a nascent mercantile capitalist economy. Feverish industrialization ripped apart the religious and familial bonds of Catholic and Orthodox Christian immigrants from the old countries. Technological innovation, the Marshall Plan, and “Finance” shattered a hundred towns and cities in the Rust Belt, leaving people to bargain with the Eastern Establishment for control of their homes. In the 21st century, refugees from wars in the imperial periphery are arriving on the shores of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers to pick up the pieces and eke out a living for themselves.ErieThere’s no better way to frame this than by diving into the Erie Canal, which was explained to me in succinct terms by a book in Syracuse’s Erie Canal Museum titled “The Psychic Highway: How the Erie Canal Changed America.” In 2025 — the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Canal — it is little more than a novelty for the quirky tourist. But for at least 100 years, the Erie Canal transformed the physical and psychological reality of early America, thrusting an agrarian and largely homogenous society into mills and factories alongside people from heretofore unknown corners of the earth.The idea of the Canal had been tossed around for almost a century, but it wasn’t until the growth of large-scale grain farming West of the Appalachians that a low-cost route from the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean became a serious political winner. “Clinton’s Ditch” is not a crass euphemism from Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox but in fact the moniker that New York State Governor DeWitt Clinton’s aggressive campaign for the Erie Canal received from Jeffersonian opponents (including Thomas Jefferson himself) who believed it would violate the Constitution and waste public dollars. (They also wanted a Westward intercontinental belt for themselves down in Virginia). Clinton, through creative financial back-channeling that Nelson Rockefeller would recreate 150 years later, found a way to fund the Canal through the issuance of New York State bonds and authorized construction of the Canal beginning with its middle segment near Rome, New York.It was indubitably not a waste of money, as toll revenues from its first year of operation quickly covered debts incurred by its construction. Along the Canal, which followed the route of the Mohawk River between the Adirondack Mountains to the North and the Catskills to the South, new cities and towns sprang up almost overnight, and existing villages became minor metropolises. “Surely, the water of this canal must be the most fertiziling of all fluids; for it causes towns… to spring up, till, in time, the wondrous stream may flow between two continous lines of buildings, through one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany.”— Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835, The Canal BoatCarried through the febrile waters of the Canal, industrial capitalism propagated from its humble origins in the milltowns of Massachusetts and Rhode Island to inland New York, instantly proletarianizing rural workers who had themselves moved Westward from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. (By 1855, it was reported that four out of five internal migrants to Upstate New York were born in New England). Some of these workers had failed at tilling the harsh New England soil, and some had found their lives immediately debased by mill industrialism, but they had all arrived in America to wrest Protestantism away from the omnipotence of the urban market. The instantiation of advanced industrial capitalism in Upstate New York was thus experienced as something like armageddon.In the Burned-over District, spanning the area around Oneida Lake (presently Syracuse) westward to Buffalo, the flame of religious hysteria ignited by the honking, stinking machines led to the births of at least seven new religious sects. These include the Millerites, whose initial proclamation that Jesus would return in approximately 12 years would form the foundation for the Seventh-day Adventist movement. These also include the Mormons: Joseph Smith’s teenage revelations and subsequent procurement of the Book of Mormon occurred during his childhood in Palmyra, New York, where he was raised by two parents of equally intense religious fervor.The leaders of the lesser-lived Oneida Society preached that Jesus returned to Earth 70 years after his death and attempted to institute a perfectionist Kingdom of Heaven, which was to be attained through a careful mixture of early eugenics, abstinence, communal childcare, and group marriage. 50 years after its founding, the Society mediated its beliefs and began manufacturing cutlery along the Canal, which today is sold through its descendant, Oneida Limited, one of the largest dinnerware producers in the world.But the socio-cultural forces and human pleadings unleashed by the Canal were not limited to religious cults. The rough and rowdy towns of the Canal quickly became hideaways for formerly enslaved people fleeing the South for Upstate New York and Canada. Cities like Utica and Albany became major stops along the underground railroad, where groups of runaways would take cover during the day and stow away down the Canal by night. The Canal’s waters also shepherded Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglass to Seneca Falls to convene at the first women’s rights convention in the country. Rochester, located both on the Canal and in the rich plain of the Genesee River, became by the 1850s a national hub for the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements.“For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life.”— Herman Melville, 1851, Moby DickUnderstood, then, as a “Psychic Highway,” the Erie Canal carried the pulsing current of modernity through Upstate New York, where it was met by obstinate and idealistic Protestant New Englanders, eager masses of Irish immigrants, and, of course, the various tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy (a.k.a. the Haudenosaunee).By 1830, New York was the “Empire State,” the beating heart of a new American economy that had made Albany the ninth-largest city in the country and New York City the largest. Over two hundred years after Henry Hudson disembarked the Half Moon and declared the Hudson River and its untamed environs for the Dutch, Upstate New York erupted forth from sylvan hills into North America’s steely furnace. Fifty years later, the Empire State had become a veritable global superpower, entering warp drive through the great Y-Combinator of the country’s industrial economy: the Civil War.Today, the Psychic Highway continues to guide travelers across New York State, only now it exists in the form of the New York State Thruway (I-90), which played a major role in the slow death of the Canal as an economic force.AlbanyAlbany, the oldest continuously chartered city in America, was blessed by its location near the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, where the Erie Canal turned South towards New York City and an engorged steamboat could chart a profitable course in three of the four cardinal directions. For some time through the 1940s, you might reasonably estimate that the surplus of Northeastern industry and trade was so great that Albany existed in an informal truce with New York City. Capital (in the form of immigrant labor or bank reserves) accumulated in both places with no hints of the zero-sum game that would emerge through the malaise of the post-post-war years.Returning, now, to my sensory experience, I began my day in Albany by parking my car at the city’s Southern edge, near the Port of Albany. Passing mid-20th-century low-rise housing developments on the city’s outskirts and charting a course directly towards the heart of the city, I recalled a simple fact of life on Earth: things age. Subjects of this force include but are not limited to explosive point guards, Gouda cheese, and the built environment. Given enough time, insufficient capital expenditure, and a governing apparatus at best disinterested and at worst actively inclined to contribute to the aging process, an old city will become unsuitable for habitation.Way back in the day, the South End was a classically Northeastern working-class neighborhood, inhabited by a procession of upwardly mobile European laborers whose first efforts at wealth-building were rebuffed by redlining: first German, then Irish, then Jewish and Italian workers settled on the dense streets South of the Capitol. Short-term tenants of the neighborhood as they were, the German and Irish contingents left an indelible mark on the area and on the city: Dan O’Connell, the long-time Chairman of the County Democratic Party and the Albany area’s preeminent political kingmaker, was born in the South End and ran his political operations from there for decades. O’Connell was one half of the Corning-O’Connell machine that dictated Albany politics for the better part of a century, alongside mayor Erastus Corning II (namesake of Corning Tower), whose great-grandfather founded the New York Central Railroad, a key arm of the continent-bestriding Vanderbilt octopus.Over the course of his forty-two years in office — making him the longest-serving mayor of any big city in American history — Corning presided over the decline of the South End and ultimately the city. Faced with the existential threats of deindustrialization and white flight, Corning’s Rube Goldberg machine had no tools at its disposal, nor any sort of institutional willpower, to halt the incoming demographic freight train. As middle-class white families left the city’s core for the suburbs, they sold their homes to absentee landlords who devised two brilliant strategies to squeeze profits from the wave of Black migrants blown in from the last gasps of the Great Migration: refuse to repair or maintain occupied dwellings, and neglect to pay city property taxes on vacant buildings. Corning’s machine aided such negligence by dumping the balance of unpaid taxes onto Albany County, which by 1961 owed the largest sum of delinquent tax dollars to New York State of any county.I traversed the South End on foot, heading up towards the hill that hosts The Plaza. I passed a row of rotting houses bearing the mark of the beast: a white “X” on a red metal sheet indicating condemnation, or a determination by the city that the building is not safe for entry. I went several blocks without hearing any signs of life other than the regular rumble of CDTA (Capitol District Transportation Authority) buses, whose stalwart operators continue to serve Albany’s working class against all odds. A mom and her jubilant kid — ten years old, maybe — boarded a bus in front of an abandoned lot, which in its emptiness revealed a ramshackle wooden rowhouse standing askew under the distant gaze of Corning Tower. Framed by vacant lots and the occasional collapsed roof, Corning Tower’s unbroken vertical lines and blast-proof concrete thrusted upwards into the background of every street corner in the South End.Albany’s range and volume of abandoned properties — which number, shockingly, over one thousand — tell a clear story that is contextualized in its urgency by demographic data. In Brandeis University’s 2010 Child Opportunity Index study, neighborhoods across the country were assigned a score from 1-100 based on factors including educational opportunities and health outcomes. Arbor Hill, a predominantly Black and Hispanic Albany neighborhood just on the other side of the Capitol, scored a 1, not far below the South End and several other census tracts within Albany’s core.On the opposite side of the city, by the Hudson, derelict rowhouses, seas of asphalt, and shuttered warehouses dominated the landscape, orbiting around the black sun of The Plaza and punctuated only by the colossal civic infrastructure of downtown. The stunning, castle-like SUNY Administration building (formerly the Delaware & Hudson Railroad Company Building) revealed itself at the foot of State Street, a half-mile down the road from The Plaza. As I glanced down the street towards the SUNY building, the last throes of fall foliage on an invasive Nordic Maple (planted at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller) could not have looked more out of place.The forces that have so fated Albany are familiar in urban America, more so in the Rust Belt, and even more so across Upstate New York. You’ll find in each Upstate city’s history a distinct, noxious cocktail of redlining, deindustrialization, white flight, urban renewal, urban freeways, environmental racism, and even arson. Through the Erie years, it looked like the arrow would never turn down, until it did. Why, then, are some of Albany’s neighborhoods so singularly barren of opportunity?You could say that Albany experienced the post-industrial transition relatively early, becoming a hub for state government before World War II and thus bleeding jobs for almost a century. You could ask how the city’s machine politics — developed specifically to cater to the needs of industrial wage laborers and their broader ethnic groups — survived until at least 1983, when Corning’s death ended his epochal shift as mayor. You’d find that the O’Connell-Corning machine rode the tide of post-war prosperity out to the suburbs, effectively neutering the inner-city job market in favor of subsidizing homeownership, especially for the newly stable Irish Catholics that formed much of the machine’s early constituency. You could correctly note that in the absence of a flourishing job market, Albany has experienced South Asian levels of brain drain for half a century, its most promising talents reliably charting courses down the Hudson. And you could sketch a reasonably convincing comparison to other disinvested capital cities across the country with similarly dismal outlooks for growth, like Lansing, Michigan, or Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.But the fact is that the poorest neighborhoods in Albany form an outer ring around The Empire State Plaza, as if The Plaza shrouds its environs in a slowly-strangling airborne toxin. Did The Plaza kill Albany? Maybe, but The Plaza is a collection of inanimate objects. More likely, the Nelson Rockefellers of the world killed Albany.The PlazaAs I trudged back up the hill on State Street, The Plaza began to emerge from the thin gaps between a ring of brutalist civic structures. Arranged in a rectangle around a drained, skeletal reflecting pool, The Plaza is anchored on one side by the New York State Capitol, a magnificent 1899 Beaux-Arts behemoth. It was, at the time of its completion, the most expensive American government building ever constructed. The Capitol’s delicate ornamentation — milky stained glass windows, tiered columns of varying shapes and styles — is easy to lose within the sheer scale of the building. Though the other buildings in The Plaza post-date the Capitol, they seem to build on the Capitol’s ideal that civic infrastructure ought to dwarf the humans that it serves.The Plaza itself is raised maybe 100 feet above its surrounds by a sheer stone wall. This provides visitors with a terrific view of the Capitol area and the gentle Mohawk lowlands, while rendering The Plaza completely inaccessible from its two sides that border actual Albany residents. It doesn’t take a veteran urban planner to imagine what that might do for the city’s residents. But then again, The Plaza seems uninterested in addressing them at all.As I entered The Plaza, the Capitol on my right, all of its core buildings became visible all at once. The sun obliged my Canon and emerged with only about an hour left in the day. I froze for a minute, allowing my eyes to acclimate to the sun’s new glare, refracted and magnified in every direction by stone, granite, and concrete.About a quarter-mile across The Plaza, facing the Capitol Building, is the solemn, hulking New York State Museum, which houses a wonderful collection of cultural artifacts from around the state in a concrete fortress. The Mohawk longhouses stored inside the minimally-trafficked museum are highlighted for their energy efficiency and ease of construction, something that could never be said about The Plaza, which blew past its mumbo-jumbo budget estimate of $250 million to ultimately cost taxpayers over $2 billion.Flanking the long sides of The Plaza are its remaining six buildings, which are the real showstoppers. On one side, dropped uneasily over The Plaza’s ravine walls, are Corning Tower and The Egg. I had observed Corning Tower, the tallest building in the state outside of New York City, all day from around the city, but approaching such stark verticality from its base elicited a new feeling of vertigo; I was subsumed by it and rendered its subject, rather than the other way around. Viewing The Egg had a similarly alienating effect, though not from any sense of diminution. The Egg’s impossibly smooth curves, ending abruptly in a flat, diagonal plane, pleased my eyes but felt inhumane, as if their domineering creator had sought to eliminate the possibility of variance or human error.On the other long side of The Plaza are the four symmetrical Agency Towers, arranged in a straight line like a row of bureaucratic dominoes. Unfortunately, having marinated my brain in American propaganda for 24 years or so, I have no choice but to describe these buildings as Soviet-adjacent. Each labeled with its respective number (“Agency Building 1,” “Agency Building 2,” etc.), the Agency Towers are uncompromisingly opaque about their functions. Knowing now fairly well that the New York State government has ceded most of its development authority to the private sector, it’s funny to consider the powerful, clandestine operations that the Towers were supposed to house. “Agency Building 1” — this might be where elite teams of analysts and operatives reshaped the financial fabric of the state. “Agency Building 2” — this could be where the State, having observed price-gouging activities from a terrible private enterprise, laid down the long arm of the law. In reality, life on The Plaza consists of State employees sheepishly ripping Elder Wand-esque vapes five to ten feet from the door of a Tower before quickly scuttling back inside. (No disrespect to State workers, who do very important and difficult work. But imagine the State building a plaza like this today.)Accordingly, noise in The Plaza is muted. Like ants, the slow, irregular churn of State employees made no noise and was barely registered by my eyes as flecks in the distance. The roar of a truck engine, the screeching of tires around a bend — all were far-off and slight. I had the feeling that I was alone in that space, floating above the more complex urbanity below. And what an enormous space, stretching some 60 years of architectural history and 1,500 feet between the titanic Capitol on the East end to the cold, futuristic New York State Museum on the West. Navigation on foot was disorienting and confusing, inducing a trance-like state. Where did I enter again? Where is my car? When did I get here? Frigid evening winds shooting through the air carried no sounds but tossed about the splendid maple leaves in serene and hypnotic arrangements.Striking as it is in 2025, The Plaza was about a decade late to the modernist tower movement and nearly twenty years late to installing the short-lived but eternally ruinous ideas of modernist city design. Though The Plaza was widely panned by architectural critics, who by the early 1970s had already observed the full lifecycle of the “tower in the park” modality conclude with the demolition of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Towers, The Plaza’s material impact would have made Le Corbusier blush. Corbusier’s modernism saw in an industrialized Western world two truths: material and building technology that had progressed beyond anything previously fathomed by the discipline of architecture, and a raw, volatile mass of humanity that was at constant risk of breaking out into war, disease, or, perhaps most unsavory of all, dynamic and spontaneous interaction with an Other.Nelson Rockefeller clearly agreed with Corbusier’s interpretations, as The Plaza seeks to control all of the variables introduced by the folly of human existence. In fact, it intends to hide humanity altogether: all of its buildings are connected underground through a soulless series of passageways that allow State employees to shuttle back and forth between the Towers without ever seeing the light of day. The Concourse, as it’s called, has actually become a lifeline for State employees, as The Plaza’s concrete plains are precision-engineered to magnify near-constant gusts throughout the harsh Upstate winter. So, by virtue of the architect’s folly, it makes no sense for employees to emerge from the burrows for four months of the year. The enlightened observer need not observe another fetid human until May. Unless, of course, they need a hit.Rocky’s last… edificeWe return now to Nelson Rockefeller, a man whom I first met in reading about New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis and whom I feel I now know about as well as you could from reading secondary sources and watching a few campaign speeches on YouTube. Throughout the pages of Bob Fitch’s The Assassination of New York, which chronicles the city’s mid-20th-century deindustrialization and slide into the “Fear City” of the 1970s, Nelson makes for a compelling enemy of the people. Paying great respect to Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Fitch argues that Robert Moses was a bowling ball for the ambitions and desires of more powerful, more moneyed forces in New York, whose own interests better explain the trajectory of New York City’s urban development. The Rockefellers, not Moses, are Fitch’s central bogeyman, with Nelson channeling family power at the helm of Rockefeller Center and then New York State, and David similarly leveraging the heft of Chase Manhattan Bank.I could sit here and write a droning tome replicating The Assassination of New York about the Rockefellers’ — Nelson’s, David’s, and even John III’s — influence on the IND Sixth Avenue Line (which today carries the B, D, F, and M trains), or the Rockefeller-driven urban renewal project in San Juan Hill (which today is Lincoln Center), or Rockefeller-funded slum clearance in Morningside Heights (which led to the development of several of Columbia’s core buildings). But let me not lose sight of Albany, and the greater thread, which is really about the inward collapse of the Great Society state and its Olympian liberal figures.If the Great Society — LBJ’s great federal anti-poverty crusade — was the final attempt of the New Dealers to redistribute post-war surplus, and if the Great Society concluded with a whimper in the Nixon years, Nelson Rockefeller was its lion-hearted avatar, embodying its contradictions, aspirations, and its ultimate failure. Like many of the robber baron dynasties and their kin, Nelson paired a pious sense of obligation to the ideal working American with a monomaniacal obsession with self-image. If ever the two beliefs came into competition, the latter always won, to the catastrophic loss of the actual working American.Into this canvass enters the Governor of New York, first elected in 1958 then re-elected every four years until his tenure in Albany expired over a decade later in 1973. Over the course of his governorship, the state budget — and debt — quadrupled, which, in conjunction with a regular cash influx from federal Great Society programs, should hint at the gob-smacking transformation that occurred under his leadership. There is simply no counterfactual for a New York State, or an Albany, or a New York City, without Governor Rockefeller.Working to apply the cleansing fire of modernity to New York, Nelson found himself shackled by the limits of the post-war governing apparatus — namely by the minimal amount of debt the State would issue without voter approval. He didn’t have time for such curiously naïve concepts as popular will, nor, he felt, did the people of New York. Following in the traditions of DeWitt Clinton (a fellow Northeastern political dynast) and Robert Moses, Nelson spent 15 years building vessels for state spending that could circumvent the democratic process, legal accountability, and financial scrutiny.Chief amongst these was the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a “public-benefit corporation” independent from the state that could itself issue bonds to pay for megaprojects. UDC bonds were not technically New York State bonds; thus, UDC projects did not require voter approval.But without State backing, how could purchasers of UDC bonds rest assured that they would be repaid? Nelson, through the UDC, invented the “moral obligation” bond, which sounds — and is — patently absurd. The State was not legally obligated to cover UDC bonds, but it was morally obligated to request funds from the legislature to cover debt payments should the anticipated revenue from UDC projects be insufficient to service debt. Through the willy-nilly issuance of moral obligation bonds, the support of financial institutions confident in the word of a Rockefeller, and a thundering river of federal funding, the UDC “launched a billion‐and‐a‐quarter dollars worth of housing construction for more than 30,000 families, most of them poor or having ‘moderate’ incomes, communities from Brooklyn to Buffalo (New York Times, 1979).”To some, this paints a complete picture of Nelson, the benevolent. Together with his massive expansion of the SUNY system, his lifelong support for Civil Rights causes despite his party’s opposition, and his extensive financial patronage of the arts, Nelson’s urban renewal efforts may have represented the salvation of the Northeastern WASP. After all, the UDC was created to memorialize Martin Luther King Jr., or so said Nelson after King’s assassination in 1968.How did the UDC build so much, and where did it build? The UDC’s organization outside of “the State government” made it the “the most powerful urban renewal agency in the nation (New York Times, 1979).” It had statewide reach, zoning override powers, a high-powered legal team that snatched up land through eminent domain, and a mandate from the State to raze, demolish, and build ad nauseam. To pass the State bill chartering the UDC, Nelson famously called upon the State Police to track down, confront, and corner would-be “no” voters in the State Assembly.The “community crushing juggernaut,” as Bob Fitch calls the UDC, mostly built housing on top of poor neighborhoods, many of which had been demolished through Moses’s urban renewal projects of the preceding decades. The former residents of those neighborhoods were often sent to newly-constructed “towers in the park”-style developments in far-flung areas, which are now the chronically underfunded housing complexes of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Subsequent housing development directly over the graveyards of old tenements — often in core areas of, e.g., Manhattan — was disproportionately aimed at middle earners and above.The UDC built almost no new housing in the Bronx, despite its rapid overcrowding in the early 1970s that, alongside myriad policy failures, led to widespread arson and the loss of ~80% of the Bronx’s low-income housing stock.In 1975, unable to service over $100M in debt, the UDC defaulted and collapsed, becoming the first State agency to do so. Morally obligated to step in, the State legislature bailed out the UDC. Two years earlier, sensing impending catastrophe as the Nixon administration abruptly halted federal housing spending, Nelson had resigned as Governor. He had handed stewardship of the UDC to Ed Logue, Boston’s great urban renewer, who had also helped New Haven attract more urban renewal dollars than any city in the country. When the UDC defaulted, Logue took the blame, and the failure of such a potent, trusted urban development engine contributed greatly to New York City’s fiscal crisis. The post-’75 transformation of the UDC into a relatively tame entity capable mostly of poking and prodding the private sector tracks the broader trajectory of public investment since then. The legacy of the UDC requires significantly further discussion than I’m able to provide here, so I’ll conclude by noting again how incongruent this type of massive public spending campaign feels in today’s environment of bone-deep austerity.At last we may return to Albany and The Plaza, which were something of a training ground for Nelson the Governor on the topics of flagrant expenditure and municipal financial strain.Two vignettes illustrate the impetus for Nelson’s vision of The Plaza. In the first, Nelson was visited in Albany by the Queen of the Netherlands, who remarked that the area around the Capitol was not fitting for a man of his stature. In the second, Nelson responded to the Queen’s provocation like a wounded child, hastily drawing up the Corning and Agency Towers on a cocktail napkin. He added in The Egg when he observed a grape seductively perched on a bowl of cream. The world, again, was his lego set.In 1962, four years before the UDC began its dominant run, Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor Erastus Corning II concocted their funding scheme for The Plaza. Corning staunchly opposed The Plaza at first, but changed course after witnessing Nelson take a wrecking ball to civic procedure downstate in earlier urban development schemes. As he had done for two decades to that point, he also identified an opportunity to distribute kickback contracts to County buddies and allies.Learning early in his career that State projects would require an irksome set of public and Assembly votes, Nelson urged Corning to engage the County government, which could itself issue bonds for the project. Nelson claimed such bonds were “self-liquidating” in that rents from the State agencies housed in The Plaza would pay back the debts over time. Those State agencies received their revenue from taxpayers, meaning that every New Yorker was footing the bill for Nelson’s monument to vanity. Earlier in his career, Nelson had written to his parents that he could have been, in another life, a “damn good architect.” He followed this up later in life by conceding to Democratic lawmakers that he had an “edifice complex,” which appeared to reach its zenith in Albany. Wallace Harrison, the indomitable architect of Rockefeller Center, was The Plaza’s architect of record, though it is widely agreed that The Plaza was entirely Nelson’s brainchild. It certainly was the masterstroke of an ideologue with no practical engineering experience, as the combination of Nelson’s indulgent materials and the epic scale of the work posed a troubling set of engineering conundrums. After years of delays, incessant nighttime noise, and even fires, The Plaza was completed at eight times the original pricetag. If we did need any further confirmation that it was indeed Nelson’s work, he remarked at the Cornerstone Ceremony that it was transforming Albany into “one of the most brilliant, beautiful, efficient, and electrifying capitals in all the world.”Locals in Albany had their own name for The Plaza: “Rocky’s final erection.”The GutTo make way for The Plaza, the State demolished 1,500 households and apartment buildings, 350 businesses, four churches, and 29 taverns. 98 acres in the heart of Albany, housing between 7,000 to 9,000 people, were cleared. That represents, unbelievably, nearly 10% of Albany’s population today.Nelson didn’t need to raise popular support for The Plaza, as he had found a way to build it without engaging in any way with the messy web of democracy. But deep in his self-obsession was an everlasting desire for adoration from his subjects. There’s no doubt that he felt he should have been regarded as a modern Prometheus, bringing fire to the “slums” of central Albany.To underscore the narrative of renewal, he began referring to the area to be excavated as “The Gut,” which was something of a red light district actually located adjacent to the Plaza site. In reality, the neighborhood in question was an archetypal Albany neighborhood — working class and predominantly Italian-American, with a growing Black population.In other words: real, ordinary people, of whom Nelson had no conception. The luckiest among them — the wealthiest and whitest, really — received about $500 and were able to move to the big-box suburbs growing outside the city. Some of the poorest resettled in the South End and in Arbor Hill, and almost all stayed within the City of Albany. Racial and class-based segregation, already enshrined in the city and growing through deindustrialization, were accelerated greatly by the construction of The Plaza.There were protests, of course, but they have remarkably little traction in the fossil record. Most of what you see when looking for an organized response to The Plaza consists of the State Comptroller’s reliable objections to ballooning cost estimates. 50 years later, it appears almost as if The Plaza had always been there, no Earth or man flayed in the process.Some former residents were relocated closeby to Lincoln Square Homes, a classic “tower in the park”-style public housing tower that I passed when walking through the South End earlier in the day. Earlier this year, the City of Albany passed a resolution to demolish Lincoln Square Homes, which had been shuttered for years after gaining a reputation for crime and neglect.Cruelly, you likely know “Lincoln Square” from its more famous Manhattan counterpart. Lincoln Center, today the performing arts mecca of Eastern liberalism, was lobbied extensively for by Nelson Rockefeller and built by Wallace Harrison over the corpse of San Juan Hill, a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. There, too, they called the neighborhood “The Gut.” At least 7,000 families were displaced by Lincoln Center’s construction, and there, unlike in Albany, families failed to receive any monetary compensation.I felt in The Plaza the same thing I felt circling Atlanta on its interstate highways and observing Downtown’s postmodern towers, which were designed almost entirely by John Portman. Portman’s towers shock and awe the interstate viewer in their bizarre, anachronistic forms, but on the ground they create a deadzone with minimal commercial activity and skybridges that dissuade usage of the street grid. Building on a legacy of urban renewal that saw the construction of I-95 along the legendary Sweet Auburn neighborhood, Portman’s towers demand intense scrutiny. What does it mean for one man to have dictatorial control of the cityscape? In the United States, the freest of free countries, how free are we when the urban landscapes we inhabit were wrecked and rebuilt behind closed doors? And why are the same people always rendered profoundly unfree by the consequences of those back-room decisions? The deals are done, and all that’s left to negotiate for are the spoils.I finished up at The Plaza in a daze and headed East towards Arbor Hill, hoping to catch whatever I could of Albany before the sunset. Arbor Hill is in some ways the neighborhood evinced by the data. But in other ways, the data is rude, hypersimplistic. And sure, if you have the money, you’d probably like to live in a neighborhood where a plurality of homes are not condemned. But Arbor Hill also felt truly urban in a way that much of Albany had not, and thus, in a sense, alive. I saw people of all sorts of backgrounds — different races, ethnicities, ages, and abilities — mostly just coexisting. A taqueria, next to a Mosque, next to a deli. Older dudes on the corner. Grandma on the other corner. Kids running around.A block over from Central Avenue, a couple of (seemingly) Bangladeshi kids hopped off a school bus, did a bit of horseplay, and skipped over to their house. Walking slowly on the opposite side of the street to make myself visible, we exchanged cursory head nods. I considered how far they had come to arrive here in Upstate New York, traveling a Psychic Highway of their own thousands of miles around the globe. I appreciated the thought that they had won some new life here.DinnerAfter the sun faded over the horizon, I drove to my Airbnb in Watervliet (pronounced “water fleet”), a Northern “suburb” of Albany. “Suburb,” I say, because the suburbs I know are the sprawling, manicured subdivisions of Dallas-Fort Worth, which make Watervliet look like Kowloon Walled City. At its core are lovely 19th-century row-houses, some with slightly bigger lots, surrounded by duplexes and more spacious multi-family arrangements farther out. Colonie, another suburb 15 minutes West of the Hudson River, is more of a “suburb” to me as it checks off two core requirements in the Real American Suburb framework: origins in exclusionary racial covenants, and/or exclusively post-war development. When Albany’s population plummeted by about 40,000 between 1950 and 1980, Colonie’s population grew by the same margin. This Times Union article describes the experience of a Black State employee who moved to Colonie from Albany in 1976 before experiencing enough racism that he moved his family back to Albany within three years.I fiddled around on Google Maps for a bit before finding “Nihari Point,” a Pakistani restaurant. Not having known Upstate New York for its South Asian fare, I was curious about the 4.8 rating on Google Maps (earned, not given) and drove over. I sat at one of the empty restaurant’s three tables under oppressive tube lights and scanned the main wall, which was covered in bills from around the world adorned with “Good Luck!” notes from friends and family members. It was a bit of a rough-and-tumble operation, and in my omni-meekness, I milled between the cash register and my table for about 20 minutes before one of the two people in the kitchen realized I was there. With a Nike hoodie on and an AirPod in his left ear, a high schooler walked over to my table and asked “What do you want bro?” Suitably disarmed, I ordered an Aloo Chole and a Garlic Naan, which I saw being made in short order in a Tandoori oven.A few minutes later, the kid returned with the naan and a heaping carton of chickpeas, oozing microplastics and flavor. I asked the kid if this was his dad’s business. He confirmed and added that the business’s entire labor force comprised him, his dad, and the other fellow in the kitchen, who popped out to say hello and ask if I was South Indian. “Yes,” I said, “from Tamil Nadu.” He happened to be from Andhra Pradesh, the neighboring state, and lobbed me a couple of fastballs in Tamil that I homered to left field.I finished the food in ten minutes. The glee must have been palpable on my face, because when I looked up the kid was grinning. “Good, isn’t it? I made it. Can I get you another naan? On us.” At this point, my eyeballs were popping out of their sockets, but I said no, thank you, and started asking him about the restaurant and his life in Watervliet. His family moved to Watervliet from Flushing Meadows in Queens about four years ago, where they were packing nine people into their grandmother’s three-bedroom apartment: him, his parents, an aunt, uncle, two cousins, and their grandparents. Seeking more space, his parents moved the family up to the Capital Area, where his dad figured he could capitalize on a growing South Asian and Muslim population by starting a family-style Pakistani restaurant. The kid didn’t seem too pleased. “The city was lit bro. Everybody here just drinks, smokes weed, and plays video games. I don’t really know what to do with them.” I thought about noting that the first two activities seemed to be commonplace everywhere I’ve been, but decided not to out myself that way. He mentioned that he’s applying to college this year and is looking for a good forensics program in Upstate New York, because Dexter is his favorite show of all time (“You HAVE to watch it.”) He again offered a free naan and another round of Aloo Chole, but I had to be the adult in the room, so I wished him the best on his college applications and went on my way back to my Airbnb.Other photos from Albany and the surrounding areaSources referenced here and for further readinghttps://98acresinalbany.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/a-beautiful-brilliant-efficient-and-electrifying-capital/https://reallifemag.com/the-edifice-complex/https://rockinst.org/blog/the-history-and-harm-of-federal-urban-renewal-policy-in-new-york-state/https://governingnewyork.com/essays/nelson-a-rockefeller-and-crisis-governance/https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/15/archives/goodbye-slum-razing-hello-grand-hyatt.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1975/11/09/archives/lessons-to-be-learned-from-udcs-collapse.htmlhttps://www.npr.org/2019/12/18/788888302/in-nearly-every-u-s-metro-area-new-data-show-opportunity-for-kids-of-color-lagshttps://www.timesunion.com/projects/2021/albany-divided/https://www.timesunion.com/history/article/looking-back-making-empire-state-plaza-albany-19885989.phphttps://www.timesunion.com/upstate/article/Reassessing-the-legacy-of-the-Empire-State-Plaza-6280852.phphttps://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1976/07/02/75626481.html?pageNumber=11https://web.archive.org/web/20130625115719/http://www.lofaber.com/albany/essaymaking.htmlhttps://dev.picturingurbanrenewal.org/wireframe/city-stories/albany-displaced.htmlhttps://contra-mundum.com/the-psychic-highway-that-carried-the-puritans-social-crusade-westward/https://michaeltkeene.com/the-psychic-highway/https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/08/reviews/980208.08weismat.htmlhttps://itineranturbanist.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/albanys-machine-last-of-the-old-breed-or-first-of-the-new/http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/index.htmlhttps://www.versobooks.com/products/1419-the-assassination-of-new-york?srsltid=AfmBOoqoeassOwrKTHLe4mFTXbjJGLWNlzRk7H6qprdWK7Y0OvECU8P4