Founded by Dutch fur trappers in the early seventeenth century, ALBANY made its money by controlling trade along the Erie Canal, and its reputation by being capital of the state. It's not an unpleasant town, just rather boring, with its contemporary character almost exclusively shaped by political and bureaucratic affairs, though there are a few livelier areas on the fringes.

A good place to start a tour is the Quackenbush House , the city's oldest building, built along the river in 1736 and now serving as part of the Albany Urban Culture Park . The modern visitor center next door at Broadway and Clinton (Mon-Fri 9am-4pm, Sat & Sun 10am-4pm; tel 518/434-6311, ) has free maps and occasionally leads guided tours of the downtown area, where there are a number of Revolutionary-era homes. It also has engaging displays tracing Albany's history, with a special emphasis on the impact of the Erie Canal, and maps detailing driving tours of the surrounding area, taking in a still-functioning set of locks from the original canal along with the impressive industrial legacy of Troy , across the Hudson via I-787 N.

Uphill from the waterfront, carved out from the heart of the city in the Sixties and Seventies as part of a controversial urban renewal project, Nelson A. Rockefeller's Empire State Plaza replaced 98 acres of nineteenth-century buildings (and displacing hundreds of Albanian families) with a complex that includes a subterranean retail arcade lined with impressive modern art. The view from the Corning Tower 's 42nd floor observation deck (daily 10am-2.30pm; free) looks out far across the state, beyond the twisting Hudson River to the Adirondack foothills, the Catskills and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. It also peers down on the neighboring Performing Arts Center, known locally as " The Egg " (tel 518/473-1845) - which adds the only curves to the Plaza's harsh angularity.

The New York State Museum (daily 9.30am-5pm; free; tel 518/474-5877), one level down at the south end of the plaza, reveals everything you could want to know about New York State in imaginative if static tableaux. The excellent section on New York City history is better than anything like it in Manhattan itself, with exhibits on immigration and skyscraper construction, storefronts and trolley cars, and the original set of Sesame Street .

The most engaging part of Albany is the few blocks west of the plaza, stretching between Washington and Madison avenues to the open green spaces of Washington Park , laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture. The recently renovated Albany Institute of History and Art , 125 Washington Ave (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; $5, free Wed; tel 518/463-4478), has a good range of Hudson River School paintings, and the neighborhood is full of the same sort of nineteenth-century brick-built homes Rockefeller had pulled down to build his Empire State Plaza.