Government Plaza is a building complex in
Binghamton, New York
Binghamton ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of New York, and serves as the county seat of Broome County. Surrounded by rolling hills, it lies in the state's Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the c ...
containing the offices for the City of Binghamton,
Broome County
Broome County is a county in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 United States census, the county had a population of 198,683. Its county seat is Binghamton. The county was named for John Broome, the state's lieutenant governor when ...
and
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
New York may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* ...
State. The complex is located in
Downtown Binghamton on the block bounded by State, Hawley, Isbell and Susquehanna streets. It was constructed as part of a massive urban renewal plan in Binghamton through the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Government Plaza is composed of three buildings which come together to form a U-shaped complex:
* the towering 18-story State Office Building, which is the tallest building in the
Southern Tier
The Southern Tier is a geographic subregion of the broader Upstate New York, Upstate region of New York (state), New York State, geographically situated along or very near the state border with Pennsylvania. Definitions of the region vary wide ...
region of New York
* the Edwin L. Crawford County Office Building, which forms the east-wing of the complex
* Binghamton City Hall, which forms the west-wing.
The complex includes an underground two-level parking structure. An elevated plaza that originally led to the second-story lobby of the State Office Building was torn down in the mid-1990s due to deterioration and increasing maintenance costs.
State Office Building contamination
The State Office Building is infamous for a fire that took place on February 5, 1981. A transformer explosion in the basement of the building spewed soot containing toxic
PCBs
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are organochlorine compounds with the formula C12 H10−''x'' Cl''x''; they were once widely used in the manufacture of carbonless copy paper, as heat transfer fluids, and as dielectric and coolant fluids f ...
throughout the entire building. While initially expected to only take days to reopen, the cleanup effort revealed the difficulty of removing PCB residue. The building remained closed until October 11, 1994. Multiple environmental samples taken throughout the cleanup had illustrated that despite their best efforts, workers had been unable to remove the residue, leading to several complete decontamination procedures within the building. The duration of the cleanup, combined with the uncertainty of the final effectiveness of the cleanup, led many workers to question whether the building was safe enough for reoccupation. While the initial cost of constructing the building in 1972 was $17 million, the cleanup efforts cost $53 million.
See also
*
List of mayors of Binghamton, New York
References
{{Coord, 42, 5, 48, N, 75, 54, 41, W, display=title
Buildings and structures in Binghamton, New York
Government buildings completed in 1972
Skyscraper office buildings in New York (state)