More than a building | Scene Through the Lens

Inquirer Harrisburg reporter Gillian McGoldrick and I were leaving the office of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in the early evening last week when we saw what we thought was a janitor, mopping floors after hours.

McGoldrick had just completed the first local sit down interview Shapiro has given about his first month as governor (He talked with Fox News and the Washington Post shortly after taking office.)

The guy with the mop wasn’t a capital maintenance worker, but a member of the Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee, that has directed projects all around the Capitol Complex to restore, conserve, and preserve the art, architecture, and history of buildings.

I stayed around and talked with Robert Turner for a while after Gillian left. The building is where she works every day; as a visitor it always fascinates me. I could have walked around exploring the empty corridors for hours.

Turner was cleaning the historic works of art that everyone walks on every day. The rotunda floor is made up of Moravian Tiles, created by Henry Chapman Mercer, who in 1899 founded the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, which still operates in Doylestown, Bucks County.

His tiles are are also in the casino at Monte Carlo, Rockefeller’s Pocantico Hills, New York estate, and Grauman’s Chinese Theater (now the TCL Chinese Theater) in Hollywood, but the Capitol holds the largest single collection.

And grouted into the floor among all those tiles, are 368 mosaics tracing the history of the Commonwealth from prehistoric times to 1906.

I’ve been in many statehouses around the country, and think Pennsylvania has one of the most beautiful capitol buildings in the nation. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

After making the tiles and mosaics for the Capitol, Mercer went on to build his own home, named Fonthill Castle, next to his tile works and a museum to house the artifacts of Americana that he had collected.

The reason we were in the Capitol after hours is that our interview had been moved back a few hours because earlier in the day the Governor traveled to the site of the train derailment in East Palestine near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border and met with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and and federal officials.

I had planned to make generic images of the state Capitol before the interview, so the extra time - during that fleeting “Golden Hour” we photographers love, around either sunrise and sunset when the sun is low on the horizon - gave me another opportunity,

Inquirer photos are distributed on a couple of news sharing services, and used with stories distributed by Spotlight PA, an independent, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to investigative and public-service journalism about Pennsylvania state government and urgent statewide issues.

The Inquirer is a partner and contributes stories and photos. So many of my file photos of the Capital are used often to illustrate stories about elections, voting, the governor, and the legislature and Supreme Court.

(BTW, that’s not my shadow. Look closely at the direction the setting sunlight comes from)

Leaving after dark also put me in a position to make some bonus night-time file photos as well.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column