Legislative Office Building

Before the construction of the Empire State Plaza, New York State's legislators kept their offices somewhere else. I don't really know where, but I suppose they were scattered here and there around the capitol, in other state buildings or converted town houses.

The main entrance to the LOB on State Street.

Since 1971, however, the legislature has a dedicated office building for those lawmakers who don't have offices inside the capitol itself. Of course, that would be most of them, since only the leadership members can have an office in the old capitol.

Agency Building 4 pokes up behind the more horizontal LOB.

I used to walk through this building all the time on my way into and out of the plaza to work. Except for the times when I would walk through the capitol building. All of the buildings on the plaza are connected by a concourse, a quarter mile long corridor underneath the plaza itself.

The LOB and its little sister, the Justice Building (right).

The concourse is more than a simple corridor, of course. It contains shops and restaurants, other services, and is home to an extensive collection of modern art, one of the legacies of former governor Nelson Rockefeller. There is also a meeting center, an underground bus terminal, and connections to the capitol building and the A.E. Smith office building. The concourse is handy for moving around the capitol complex in bad weather, especially in winter.

Art outside the LOB.

The Legislative Office Building, or LOB for short, contains a cavernous lobby atrium with a grand staircase that leads from street level down to the concourse level. I watched Jane Fonda film a scene from one of her lesser known (and pretty bad) movies called "Rollover" (released in 1981) in that atrium once. Unfortunately, due to recent security measures, moving through these buildings is not as easy as it once was.