I've been thinking lately about how people get away with stupid planning decisions. How can individuals and agencies so seriously impact a community but escape any form of punishment? If you commit a crime against a community, is it any less serious than a crime against a person? Should it not go unpunished?

Three projects come to mind that have made a serious negative impact on the Capital District. The construction of the Empire State Plaza, the I-787 Interchange system, and the SUNYA campus.

The Plaza, designed by Wallace K. Harrison, was the dream of the late governor Nelson Rockefeller. The main impact was the displacement of thousands of residents and small businesses, the lifeblood of a community that evolved over two hundred years. It was replaced by marble and steel and a totally new population of transient commuters from the suburbs. They didn't live and raise their families there, or spend their money at the local corner mom and pop grocery store. These were daily invaders who demanded parking spaces for their sacred cars to rest for 8 hours, taking up that valuable real estate, while they worked in towers that overlooked the very area they destroyed. And, at the end of the day, they all ran to their sleeping vehicles to get back home to suburbia, leaving a ghost town in their wake, until the next day when they cycle began anew.

Approaching this monument from the west, you notice the insloping fortified walls holding up the plaza, complete with hanging waterfalls, before you are swallowed into the belly of this stone and steel beast. It reminds me more of a precolumbian temple of doom from an Indian Jones movie. The architecture: Dominos (four agency towers), the Candle (Corning Tower), the birthday cake (Cultural Ed Building), and the petrified satellite dish (the Egg - ET call home!) certainly stand out among more ornate and better designed buildings such as the Capitol, State Education Building, or the Catholic Cathedral. Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, calls it the "International Power Style of the Fifties." I call it "Garbage Exhibitionism." I don't take away the art, culture, and events that find their way to the Plaza, but I do find it cold and uninviting and find it symbolic of a larger attitude of power over the people.

I-787 is another abnormal brain synapse. Let's wipe out thousands of homes and businesses so people can drive between Albany and Troy in ten minutes, or as we have seen, get out of town permanently. Certainly, this spaghetti network has made it easier for people to get out of the area and not come back. Only 11.6 miles of road but miles of disaster stories. This stretch runs north from I-87 in Albany to NY 7 outside Troy, and then east over the Collar City Bridge ending at 8th St. in Troy. Once called the Riverside Route, it cut off the city of Albany from the river, flattened an entire downtown that once existed in Watervliet, and devastated the lower part of Hoosick Street in Troy. Before the present route was built, they first destroyed hundreds of historic homes and businesses in South Troy, along Ferry Street (including Uncle Sam's House), and 8th Street, and then changed their mind.

The SUNYA campus is another example of ill planning. We know the State got a bargain price for this sprawling concrete bunker designed by Edward Durrell Stone. Designed for a country with a lot of sun, the campus became a joke when I attended there thirty years ago. During Winter, it was a wind tunnel tossing humans around like leaves in a storm. Sprawling, uninviting, and more like a jail, you had to park a 'mile' from the main center - that is students did, faculty and staff had the luxury of parking next to their buildings. You needed a car to get there since it was built miles from downtown. Instead of integrating the college in downtown like RPI or Russell Sage, it cut off the student body from the city even though the student dorms were uptown. Can you say extreme waste of energy costs? Now the square peg design is ruined by a series of new buildings and the symmetry of Stone is no more.

It's time to start publishing the names of those responsible for planning disasters. Perhaps, if they realize that their face will be attached to their decisions, they will spend a little more time studying the impact of their plans - before they put them into action.