Governors have lived at 138 Eagle Street since 1875, and the New York State Executive Mansion faces you now. The house you face was built in 1856 as a private home in the Italianate style for banker Thomas Olcott. In the 1860s its second owner, Robert L. Johnson, extensively remodeled the residence.
Samuel Tilden became the first governor to live here when he rented it in 1875, and the state purchased it two years later; it has housed governors and their families since 1875. Among those who called this place home were three future Presidents of the United States: Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt. In 1960 Governor Nelson Rockefeller installed a fallout shelter here.
After a fire in 1961 there was talk of building or buying a modern mansion uptown, but Rockefeller fought for restoration and helped get the mansion named to the National Register of Historic Places. In the early 1980s the Executive Mansion Preservation Society was formed to coordinate restoration, and at one time inmates from state prisons staffed the mansion. Notice the Italianate details along the façade of this long-lived corner of Albany.