I-90 runs east-west across the top of this map, NY 85 is the freeway that branches off from I-90 and hears out to the south. NY 5 (Central Av) is the main street that diagonally crosses the northeast corner and US 20 (Western Av) goes diagonally across the bottom. I have highlighted many of the roadways of the State Office Campus parkways. Scale is approx. 1 km per grid square.
The area around the I-90/NY 85 interchange in Albany, NY is a great example of auto oriented 'modernism' at its peak in the 1960s. At that time, the State of New York embarked on an ambitious project to update the offices of their state capital region bureaucracy, collecting them into a couple of central 'showpiece' locations and making them easily accessable. At that time, that meant making the office centers as 'auto friendly' as possible. This project resulted in the 'Empire State Plaza', a futuristic complex of high-rise office buildings just south of the capitol building in downtown Albany (it looks like it just stepped off of the set of a 'Star Trek' (the Original series) episode and was likely inspired architecturally by the UN Headquarters) and a more sprawled out campus of low-rise buildings on the city's west side. The west side campus is served by an interesting network of access parkways that connect directly with I-90 and the NY 85 freeway, as well as to Washington Av. That is the State University of New York ('SUNY') campus just to the west of the State Office campus.
It is interesting to note the grade of an abandoned railroad that passes from northwest to southeast through this campus area. Projected northwestward, it feeds directly into the CSXT (ex Conrail, exx PC, nee NYC) 'Water Level' mainline. Projected the other way, I lose all signs of the grade about 1 km southeast of NY 85. This line may have been relocated at about the same time as the former NYC mainline in the central part of Syracuse, NY.
Also, there seem to be signs that a northern extension of the NY 85 freeway was once planned, but I have no idea whether this is true, and if so, where it would have gone (a connection to Central Av???).
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