Renaming the Empire State Plaza towers?

With help from Shawn Ness

One of the tallest buildings in Upstate New York might soon be named after the East River.

Outside of the bizarre ovate structure, the first thing most observers of Albany’s skyline notice is the five towers jutting out of the Empire State Plaza. Each is among the 10 tallest buildings in the 400-mile stretch east of Buffalo and north of White Plains.

The largest is named after Erastus Corning, the Albany mayor of four decades who arranged the unusual financial scheme that made it possible to fund the plaza’s construction. But the other four, which house various state agencies, provide the ultimate symbol of a soulless bureaucracy — they have numbers, rather than names.

“‘Agency 1,’ ‘Agency 2,’ ‘Agency 3,’ ‘Agency 4’ — how boring,” said Assemblymember John McDonald, whose nearby district has the best views of the buildings.

There have been various proposals over the decades to give the towers a little more sizzle.

The Assembly has occasionally passed a bill that would name them the Susan B. Anthony, Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini, Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt buildings.

The sponsors noted when it was first introduced that no state buildings were named after women, though that has since changed: Mario Cuomo renamed a building in Poughkeepsie after Roosevelt, and Assemblymember Hakeem Jeffries sponsored a 2009 law renaming one in Brooklyn after Shirley Chisholm.

Historian Richard Norton Smith found the buildings "lacking in much individuality” when he came to Albany a decade ago to promote his new biography of plaza architect Nelson Rockefeller. He suggested naming them after the four modern three-term governors. There’d be a Pataki Tower and a Mario Cuomo Tower — “enough in there to offend