English: As seen in July 2022, Government Plaza is the name for the cluster of office buildings on the south side of Hawley Street between State and Isbell Streets in downtown Binghamton, New York. Inaugurated in 1972, this U-shaped complex has the Edwin L. Crawford County Office Building (left background) and Binghamton City Hall (center to right, foreground) serving as lateral wings to the centerpiece, the Binghamton State Office Building, which at a height of 18 floors is the tallest in the city. It's representative of the Brutalist school of architecture with its heavy massing, exterior faced in rough-textured, precast concrete panels, and repetitive fenestration scheme of horizontal rows of windows stepped back diagonally into the façade. Plans for a new City Hall had their genesis in 1965, when, faced with the need for a costly expansion to and/or renovation of the cramped, aging building that housed their offices at the time, municipal leaders hit on the idea to construct a newer, larger and more modern structure while also breathing new life into what was then a derelict industrial district on the southern rim of downtown. Soon enough, the project came under the aegis of the city's Urban Renewal Agency, who folded it into their so-called Project 1, and ballooned in scope to become the multi-jurisdictional Government Plaza of the present day. Though the mayor went on record as favoring the hiring of an architect "of international reputation" (floating the names of luminaries such as I. M. Pei and Louis Kahn), ultimately he was overruled by the city council who stipulated that the competition to design the massive 8½-acre complex be restricted to architects based in the local area, and it was the firm of Conrad & Cummings (later known as Cummings & Pash) who won that competition two years later with their $4.9-million proposal. Construction began in 1970 and wrapped up two years later. A memorable event in the later history of the complex occurred on February 5, 1981, when a fire sparked by a transformer explosion in the State Office Building basement spewed soot containing toxic PCBs throughout the entire building, a contamination that took thirteen full years to remediate and cost three times what it took to construct the building itself. The building remained vacant until its reopening in October 1994.