Rising a dizzying 294 feet above the shimmering main fountain of the Uptown Campus, the Carillon is the most iconic structure at UAlbany. For nearly 10 years, Brian Busher has eyed it with one goal in mind: Get to the top. When the opportunity finally arrived on a glorious October morning last fall, he seized it.
“Everybody’s seen it and probably thought, ‘I wonder what it’s like up there,’” said Busher, a photographer and director of Digital Media in the University’s marketing department. Few, however, have actually ever made it to the tower’s crown.
Fresh from a mandatory safety-training session, Busher donned a full-body harness, headlamp, and industrial-grade ear protection to guard against the 16 loudspeakers that chime every half hour. “You don’t want to get blasted off the ladder while you’re up there,” he joked.
He squeezed his way through a tiny door he called the “submarine portal,” clicked on his headlamp, locked into the safety cable and began his hand-over-hand ascent up a rough-textured metal ladder – the first of three he encountered. Busher admitted that he stopped twice during his climb. “It was actually harder on my arms than I expected it to be,” noted the avid long-distance runner, adding that he’s “no stranger to repetitive physical activity.”
The first ladder, the longest of the three, terminated at a landing adjacent to the doorway that accesses the massive tank that provides more than 300,000 gallons of water to the campus. Though commonly referred to as “the Carillon,” the entire structure is, technically, a water tank and, in 1967, earned the Steel Tank of the Year award from the Steel Plate Fabricators Association.
This is the link to the interactive YouTube video from the top of the carillon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvse26YztqQ
New upgrades completed in 2014 include 32 LED lights at the base of the tower and 8 at the top in the Carillon cage that will wash the tower in beams of light in the school’s colors, purple and gold, and hundreds of other combinations.
According to Geoffrey Williams, UAlbany archivist, the water tower was not originally placed inside the fountain in Edward Durell Stone’s design. It was outside the fountain off to the side in a large wooden model of the UAlbany complex that was on display for years. At the last minute, a junior architect with Stone’s firm, Raymond Gomez, picked up the tower on the model and moved it from outside the fountain to inside the fountain. Stone considered the new placement for a moment, thought it over and said he liked it better.
At right, much was left to be done on Sept. 23, 1965, as seen from the roof of the not-yet-completed University Library: the Carillon Tower is but a ground-level circle of metal.
Fox Rifenberg-Stempel ’25 didn’t expect a casual evening browsing the UAlbany archives to spark a campus revival project. “I was bored one night and looking through the history pages—like a history major might do,” Fox recalls. That’s when an old 2008 article about the Carillon caught his eye. It had been silent for years, only chiming the hours. Forgotten. Neglected.
Intrigued, he reached out—first to Dr. Christakis, then to Facilities and Dr. Duncan Cumming, the Music Department chair. “We met in March 2024 and tested it out. It still worked, but there were a lot of problems.” That moment kicked off a year-long journey of mechanical mysteries and musical rediscovery.
Fox had a background in trombone and some childhood piano lessons, but playing the Carillon—a keyboard that rings actual bells—was something new. “Piano is a lot harder than you’d think. And this keyboard is pretty much the same, except you’re playing over bells instead of strings.”
With persistence and a little luck, Fox found a technician who had worked on Carillons before. They contacted Maas Rowe, the California company that originally installed UAlbany’s system in 1966. The current owner, who inherited the business from his father, was thrilled the instrument was being revived. He even donated a missing part overnight.
To ensure the Carillon’s future, Fox founded the Carillon Guild, a student group dedicated to keeping the music alive. “Hopefully it won’t get forgotten again like it did for 20 years.”
The crowning moment? “Playing at graduation—literally a week after we got it fixed. It was the perfect ending to my time at UAlbany.” His favorite song to play? Bad Romance by Lady Gaga. “It’s fun watching people’s faces when they hear it from the tower. No one expects Lady Gaga from above.”
Workers scale the stem at the very tip of the University’s iconic water tank, commonly known as the Carillon, in December 2005.
