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Surely it was not in the architect's plans to exceed the budget. Much less that his grandiloquent work was baptized by its exorbitant cost. But it did. The Grand Western Staircase of the New York State Capitol in the city of Albany is known as the Million Dollar Staircase.

It was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and built by Isaac Perry from huge blocks of sandstone. A job that took 14 years, from 1884 to 1898. In theory, its creators were inspired by the Paris Opera, although many visitors insist on seeing in it the optical illusions of the paintings of M.C. Escher, the great Dutch painter.

The Million Dollar staircase totals 444 steps along four floors of this American capitol. The most curious (and expensive) of this staircase are the delicate carvings that represent dozens of distinguished characters, from Christopher Columbus to William Shakespeare. In total 97 faces, or rather, 97 plus one. Because a few days ago, for the first time in 125 years, the bust of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020, was added.

The stature of President Abraham Lincoln.SHUTTERSTOCK

She is not actually the first woman. But it is said that in the original staircase there were none. Even then, this carelessness on the part of the artists did not go unnoticed. The New York Times says that the affair caused enough astonishment in 1898 for an official to hurriedly incorporate the faces of six women on the lower level of the staircase. Of course, chosen in a somewhat random way. The goddess Minerva shares honor with suffragist Susan B. Anthony and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The faces of Civil War nurses were also sculpted; Revolutionary War legend Molly Pitcher, a figure more folkloric than historical; and the architect's granddaughter.

There are also some more allegorical figures, even some infants, among representations of flora and fauna. And some curiosity: John Jay, slave owner and governor of New York who was the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, appears twice. Observers often point to a few more picia: The name of the only black American included, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, was misspelled for more than a century until the typo was remedied in 2019.

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