By Matt Russo, Senior Reporter
The 28-foot winged figure on the face of 300 Erie Boulevard West has watched downtown Syracuse for 94 years. It is made of stainless steel, weighs several tons, and was bolted onto a building that opened in 1932 to advertise a single product: electricity. The product is now ambient and cheap. The advertisement is a city landmark.
The Niagara Mohawk Building, more accurately the Niagara Hudson Power Corporation Building when it opened, is the most photographed Art Deco structure between Albany and Buffalo. It was designed by Syracuse architect Melvin L. King of King and King Architects in consultation with the Buffalo firm Bley and Lyman. Construction ran from 1930 to 1932 in the early Depression. The building rises 112 feet on seven floors and sits on a 5.26-acre parcel that was once part of the Erie Canal corridor through Clinton Square.
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It was, in 1932, a billboard for a power company that wanted Central New York to keep its lights on through hard times.
The 1932 advertisement
The Niagara Hudson Power Corporation, formed in 1929 from a merger of three upstate utilities, was already the largest electric utility in the United States by the time ground broke for its new headquarters. The company chose King and Bley and Lyman to deliver a building that read as an icon of electricity itself. The architects answered with stainless steel cladding, black Vitrolite glass panels, gray brick, terra cotta, and aluminum, every surface chosen to reflect light back at the street. Vertical light strips ran the full height of the facade. They turned the building into a lantern.
The crowning element is the 28-foot stainless-steel winged sculpture known as the Spirit of Light. Period accounts identify it as one of the first major stainless-steel sculptures ever placed on a building exterior in the United States. The name was chosen through a contest among Syracuse schoolchildren in the 1930s. The winning entry, “Spirit of Light,” became the figure’s permanent title.
Source: Wikipedia “Niagara Mohawk Building”; National Register reference No. 10000361; Library of Congress Highsmith collection.
From Niagara Hudson to National Grid
The corporate name on the door changed five times in 78 years. In 1937, the Niagara Hudson Power Corporation extended its grid across upstate. In 1950, a reorganization produced the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, the name that stuck for half a century and that most Syracusans still use for the building. In 2000, the British utility company National Grid plc agreed to acquire Niagara Mohawk in a deal valued at roughly $3 billion. The acquisition closed in 2002. National Grid still owns the building today.
The building was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places by New York State’s Board of Historic Preservation in December 2009. It was formally listed on June 14, 2010, under reference No. 10000361. The Library of Congress holds a complete photographic survey of the exterior in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, including a frontal view at item 2018700181 used by federal architectural records.
The 2024 lighting reset
In 2023, maintenance crews discovered an issue with the original exterior lighting system, the same vertical glow that had defined the building’s evening identity for nine decades. National Grid announced a multi-year restoration in January 2024. Terra cotta and cast stone panels between the windows and around the Spirit of Light were cleaned and repaired. Vertical lighting was rebuilt to a modern LED specification capable of color shifts for civic events. The improved system was formally inaugurated on December 17, 2024, in a downtown ceremony that drew several hundred onlookers.
Source: Wikipedia “Niagara Mohawk Building”; National Grid press release, December 2024.
What it cost in 1932 dollars
Period reporting placed the original construction cost in the low single-digit millions of 1932 dollars. Adjusted to 2025 dollars using the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator, even a $2 million 1932 building would represent roughly $46 million today. The 229,271-square-foot site occupies the northern edge of Clinton Square along the original Erie Canal route. The Onondaga Historical Association maintains period photographs and design records, including images released in its 2017 public history project on the building’s interior, which is generally not open to the public.
What’s actually inside in 2026
Public records identify National Grid as the current owner of the building. National Grid uses portions of the structure as a regional operations and customer-service site. Hancock Estabrook, the Syracuse law firm founded in 1889, currently maintains its Syracuse office at 1800 AXA Tower I, 100 Madison Street, not at 300 Erie Boulevard West. CNY Signal could not confirm any reported sale of the Niagara Mohawk Building to Hancock Estabrook in real-estate records reviewed for this article.
What is verifiable is what every Syracusan can see: a 94-year-old stainless-steel figure, freshly cleaned, lit by 21st-century LEDs, still selling 1932’s promise that the lights would not go out.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Niagara Mohawk Building”; National Register of Historic Places, reference No. 10000361 (June 14, 2010); Library of Congress, Carol M. Highsmith Archive items 2018700181 and 2018700133; National Grid press release on multi-year restoration (January 2024) and re-inauguration (December 17, 2024); King and King Architects firm history; Onondaga Historical Association video “The Niagara Mohawk Building: A Peek Inside”; National Park Service case study, “Niagara Hudson Building, New York”; buildingsdb.com Niagara Mohawk Building entry; CoStar coverage of the Art Deco restoration; Hancock Estabrook firm contact page (current address 100 Madison Street, Syracuse). Hero photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
