Scorned and long neglected; New York's Governor's Mansion finally gets some love

It is perhaps the most spectacular perk of the governor’s job: a 40-room Victorian mansion, with a full-time domestic staff, on six rolling acres above the Hudson River.

But since Mario M. Cuomo left 16 years ago, the house has been oddly unloved, shunned by a procession of governors who had fancier addresses elsewhere or just wanted to escape the eerie desolation of Albany.

That neglect is about to end.

Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor-elect, is coming to Albany not just to govern, but also to live in a place still rich with family memories.

Nobody, it seems, has treasured the house, at 138 Eagle Street, the way the Cuomo family members have. Moving into the mansion punctuated their ascent to political power and lifted them out of a middle-class world in Queens, where they had crammed into a humble row house in the neighborhood of Hollis.

Mario Cuomo, the son of an immigrant grocer, was awe-struck by the opulence of the place, especially the 20-foot-long master bathroom, which he called the home’s “pièce de résistance.”

“It has to be seen to believed,” he said. “It is immense.”

His son Chris put it this way: “One minute we were living in ‘All in the Family,’ the next, we were in ‘Benson.’ ”

As the new governor tries to elevate a tarnished state government to an earlier, loftier stature, he views the house, with its splendor and history, as central to that restoration, a place he imagines brimming once again with family and social and political life.

In an interview, Andrew Cuomo spoke with sadness about its diminishment. “It gives you a sense of the importance of state government and what it was all about, and how seriously it was taken,” he said.

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