Sep 26, 2006 By Alison Hawkes For The 8 min read

HARRISBURG – Philadelphia architect Joseph Huston called it a “Palace of Art,” so ornately detailed and planned is his 600-plus room marvel of a Capitol that turns a century old next week. Below the 272-foot dome that brightens the Harrisburg skyline with its cheery green terra cotta tile, is extravagance born of a time when architectural ambitions matched the state’s desire to showcase its fast-growing industrial wealth.

Gold-leafed trim laps along the inside of the dome. The Grand Staircase is made of gray Italian marble and modeled off the Paris Opera House. And the walls are littered with murals, stained glass, and stencil images that give tribute both to Pennsylvania’s coal-mining and steel-milling past and to its higher religious and artistic callings.

Could such exorbitance, however awe-inspiring, ever be built today?

“I don’t see that happening in any state building today, with the same level of detail and attention to art as they did at the turn of the century,” said Ruthann Hubbert-Kemper, executive director of the Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee. “The focus of public money is more on the public’s interest.”

A turbid past

The Pennsylvania Capitol is ranked one of the most beautiful and historic Capitol buildings in the nation. But its history, like all histories, is turbid.

A century ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt dedicated the building on a rainy Oct. 4, 1906 he called it “the handsomest building I ever saw.” But he went on to lambaste corporate greed and offered a message poignant, also, to the scandal that was unfurling in Harrisburg over the new Capitol. He urged “a sense of honorable obligation” towards one’s fellow man and to “refrain … from doing aught to any man which can not be blazoned under the noonday sun.”

The Capitol’s price tag was a whopping $13 million ($542 million in today’s dollars). Lax oversight was blamed on the squandering of at least $5 million by contractors on the interior furnishings, including a bootblack stand that purportedly cost $1,619.20.

The famous impressionist painter, Mary Cassatt, pulled out of her contract to do a couple small paintings for the Ladies Lounge off the lieutenant governor’s suite because she said she was approached by a politician for a kickback.

It was never proven that public officials received kickbacks, but Huston, his principal furnishings contractor, and a former state treasurer and former auditor general later received prison sentences.

Author Owen Wister stated in the wake of what has become known as the Capitol Graft Scandal that Pennsylvania was a “government by knaves at the expense of fools.”

Despite the scandal, Pennsylvanians were left with a building they could admire, and one that serviced them for the next 23 governors, from the turn of the century into the modern age.

It has been the longest-standing Capitol building since the Commonwealth’s founding at the birth of the nation in 1776. Independence Hall in Philadelphia served as the site of the first General Assembly. But in 1812, a rampant bout of Yellow Fever, a call to be central to a westwardly moving population, and a fear that city politics would dominate state government instigated a move to Harrisburg, where ferry owner John Harris offered four acres at the top of a hill of his modest trading-post of a town.

A colonial brick-style Capitol building lasted 75 years until it burned down in 1897 from an unattended fire. The building was grossly underinsured at $200,000.

The Legislature met in a nearby church until a new building was completed in 1899. But that one, too, had its problems. The Legislature was tight with cash, and the architect, Henry Ives Cobb, underbid his work with the belief he could get more money out of lawmakers later. When he did not, he began scaling back the plans and stripping away the ornamentation.

The public was hostile to what remained. People called it a “barn” and a “sugar factory.” Gov. Daniel Hartman Hastings said it was “hardly fit for human habitation.”

The third time around, the Legislature thought to do it right, using the best materials, artists and craftsmen of the time.

The test of time

Huston, who many believed to be unfairly caught up in the graft scandal, retooled the existing building into the style of American Renaissance. The style had become popular in the Gilded Age of wealthy industrialists, who had the money and inclination to envision America as a new world leader deserving of beautiful public buildings that would stand the test of time.

The Pennsylvania Capitol, like the Library of Congress in Washington, is a prime example of the style, with its domes and columns that look to classical Greek and Roman architecture and its high artistic adornment. For example, the main 52-million-pound dome is inspired by Michelangelo’s design for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

“Joseph Huston wanted to show a unity of art and architecture,” said Hubbert-Kemper. “And he wanted to show the history of the building of this state. That’s the key – unified complexity of all these elements coming together as one.”

One of the ideas was to convey was the permanence of government, and so Huston consciously glazed the gold leaf so it looked like it’d always been there, Hubbert-Kemper added.

For the floors, he scrapped plans to use white marble and took up Doylestown native Henry Chapman Mercer’s suggestion to use his Moravian-style tiles, which lend an earthy character to the building.

Other artists came in. The famous Edwin Austin Abbey worked from his studio in England to create numerous murals for the House chamber and Rotunda before dying in 1911. Philadelphia muralist Violet Oakley then took over as the first woman to ever receive a large commission to adorn a state capitol. Highly illustrative and allegorical in her themes, Oakley did the 14 murals in the governor’s reception room, tracing the history of religious tolerance. In the Supreme Court she shows the history of law, including the Ten Commandments above the judge’s bench.

The best of materials were used: Irish marble in the Senate chamber along with mahogany desks and French velvet draperies. The desks, with their original inkwells, are still there.

“It’s an old English country manor style,” said Hubbert-Kemper of the Senate chamber. “It’s very much like a boy’s club.”

But soon after its creation, it all went to waste. It was benign neglect, not a fire this time. (Although, there was a small fire in 1907 attributed to mice igniting matches in a desk drawer at night at the Department of Health.)

Battleship gray

Talk to any longstanding or former lawmaker, and they will conjure up this image of their old offices: drop ceilings, florescent lighting, and cheap paneling covering walls and fireplaces.

It was the post-World War II era that called for forward-thinking – and cheap battleship gray paint. That paint, dumped on the market after the war, was used to cover everything in the Capitol. Furniture was disappearing, sold off to auction houses or put in storage or to the garbage heap.

“They didn’t see the history,” said 26-year Bucks County Rep. Paul Clymer, who chairs the preservation committee. “The beautiful marble pillars [in the Rotunda] were all brown because of the smoking.”

The building was cramped as well. The East Wing annex didn’t open until 1987. Lawmakers were piled eight to an office, with one secretary between them. General Services later found more than 100 fire code violations in the building.

Former Fayette County Rep. Fred Taylor, a Democrat, called his attic office “pigeon heaven” because the birds nested outside the windows.

“We did not have the best of conditions,” said Taylor, who was class of 1967. “If you were in the minority party, you got the attic.”

Former Bucks County Rep. Ed Burns said he remembers, in days prior to per diems when the yearly salary was $8,000, one lawmaker who set up a camper in the back parking lot and ran it off an electrical wire from the building.

“We smoked like crazy, and we drank like crazy,” Burns said. “Everybody would have a Styrofoam cup – not me of course – and would fill it with booze at five at night. And if the session went longer, things got wild.”

A legacy

It was former Republican House Speaker Matt Ryan who put an end to the madness – at least as far as the building was concerned. Hubbert-Kemper recalls him coming into work one day upset that he saw a marble fireplace put to the garbage dump by a lawmaker who was redecorating his office.

“He told me that day what he wanted to do was preserve the legacy” of this building, Hubbert-Kemper recalled.

The capitol preservation committee was formed in 1982. Since then, more than $58 million has gone into restoring the building to its original splendor. The committee retrieved antique furniture from attics and tunnels and storage bins, recovered what’s now the only original Supreme Court chair in the building from a wealthy estate, and replaced carpeting in its original design.

The artwork, too, was restored. Hubbert-Kemper recalled getting a call from a police officer in the building that “Spirit of Light,” a mural in the dome of the Rotunda, was literally falling off the wall because of water leakage.

What you see today is the completion of that work. But it’s still ongoing. The preservation committee has applied for the Capitol to receive National Historic Landmark Status, the highest honor for a historical building.

“It’s a history,” said Clymer. “And if we just take a minute to absorb it, it will make us appreciate government better and be more responsible in our own duties.”

Alison Hawkes can be reached at 717-705-6330 or ahawkes@calkins-media.com.