Civic Center area is dominated by buildings dedicated to public services and agencies, politics, law, and official business of many types; it also provides fascinating lessons in history and culture. Chinatown is lively and gritty, exotic to tourists and many New Yorkers alike.
The energy in both areas is immeasurable, but don’t be afraid to stop your stroll. Public parks offer seats for the weary. Slow down to examine artistic details, architectural touches, and more. Check out the wares sold by street vendors, or perhaps pause for some dim sum.
When you arrive at the City Hall station, ascend the stairs and walk on Broadway with City Hall and City Hall Park to your right. Dispersed throughout parts of the sidewalk are panels with historical and geographical lessons, such as one about the “British Soldiers’ Barracks.” At Chambers Street, notice an old-fashioned clock clamped to the corner building on your right: THE SUN, IT SHINES FOR ALL is the message delivered along with the time. It’s a reference to The Sun, a newspaper published from 1833 to 1950.
Go to the right along Chambers. The building with many stairs, its pediment supported by four classical columns, is the Tweed Courthouse, back-to-back with City Hall. Ah, William Magear Tweed—perhaps the most cartoonishly crooked politico in New York City history. This handsome Italianate building was built with a rapidly rising tab, due to corruption in “Boss” Tweed’s time. Now it houses the Department of Education, among other city services.
BACK STORY: A TALE OUT OF SCHOOL
New Yorkers love their Yankees. (Some love the Mets too.) The New York Yankees have won more World Series than any other Major League Baseball team; thus, a heckuva lotta victory parades have been held in the Yankees’ honor. One year, some friends and I nearly got swallowed up in one such parade.
The Yanks won the Series in 1998, sweeping the San Diego Padres. At the time, I was teaching at Murry Bergtraum High School in downtown Manhattan, and on the day of the parade, our usually solid student attendance was way down. Enthusiastic students warned us grumpy adults in advance that they would be at the parade, so please don’t give homework or tests that day, pleasepleaseplease.
Along with Howard, Nigel, and Robin, three of my cronies from the social studies department, I hatched a lunchtime plan to go over to the parade—it was, after all, practically at our doorstep. Once there, we realized that we were thick in a throng and we might have a hard time getting back in time to teach our next classes.
We saw a bit of the parade—the crowds being what they were, we heard a lot more than we saw—and then we had to beg the beleaguered police officers on duty to help us get back to Bergtraum. They had us enter the Brooklyn Bridge subway station, walk through the concourse level, and come back up across the street. Of course, there was the one cop who didn’t quite buy our story about being teachers trying to make their way back to work. But we did it, returning in time to teach just a handful of kids, who seemed resentful that they too hadn’t braved the crowds outside.
Across the street is a more opulent building, the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. Notice the beehive decorations on the main doors. (Other old bank buildings in town have bees and beehive decor, apparently symbolic links to Freemasonry, royalty, and even productivity.) Farther down the block is 31 Chambers St., the Surrogate’s Court. Among the city offices and services housed here are the Municipal Archives, records offices, the Department of Cultural Affairs, county courts, and more. The main lobby and staircases are gorgeous Beaux Arts dreams. The outside has fanciful statues and carvings, columns, and a roof that is full of detail and replete with beautiful windows.
Walk more and behold 1 Centre St., the Manhattan Municipal Building. Many New Yorkers come and go here all the time and don’t think much about it—trust me on that. But for five years I walked by it or through it every workday, when I taught at nearby Murry Bergtraum High School, and I did admire its art and architecture. Several city agencies are based here, as are the offices of the Manhattan borough president. First occupied in 1913, this regal C-shaped building of neoclassical design rises 40 stories and is topped by a gilded statue called Civic Fame that can be seen from afar. She holds a five-peaked crown, each peak representing one of the five boroughs. The building’s south arcade has a ceiling of lovely white Guastavino tiles. (In case you didn’t know, any place in New York City that has Guastavino tiling always brags about it.)
Wander around here a bit, then go back across Centre Street and to the left, into City Hall Park, where you’ll encounter the Horace Greeley statue, the Joseph Pulitzer plaque, the quaint domed kiosk entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge subway station, and more. (Sometimes you might see fenced pens of vegetables growing on the grass in this part of the park.) The pedestrian access to the Brooklyn Bridge is next to the Municipal Building. On the other side of the bridge entrances, note a tall, shimmery metallic building in the near distance. That’s 8 Spruce St., a.k.a. New York by Gehry, a reference to its architect, Frank Gehry.Turn around and gaze again at the Surrogate’s Court building; try to discern the statues near the top. The pegleg guy is Peter Stuyvesant, governor of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam from 1647 to 1664. He was roundly disliked in his time but is memorialized in many ways throughout Manhattan.
Walk back to the Municipal Building and follow the path through the arcade to the spacious plaza area. You’ll see a few intriguing sights, such as the Sugar House Prison Window, part of a Revolutionary War–era prison (although there is some debate about that), and the curious red sculpture called Five in One, by Bernard Rosenthal. Like the Civic Fame statue, it references the five boroughs of New York City, in this case with five giant interlocking disks. Farther ahead on the right is Police Plaza, headquarters for the NYPD.
Where the pathway through the Municipal Plaza ends, walk left on St. Andrew’s Plaza, follow it back to Centre Street (also signed as Foley Square) and turn right. Along this stretch, there are often food kiosks as well as seating areas. On your right, you’ll come first to the massive Thurgood Marshall US Courthouse, with its 30-story tower, and then the New York State Supreme Court Building, reminiscent of a Greek temple. neoclassical in design, these buildings are often in the news; trucks and vans from media outlets are usually nearby. The Supreme Court Building should also be familiar to fans of TV’s Law & Order.
Across Centre St. from the courts are Thomas Paine Park to the north and Foley Square to the south. Foley Square has a black-marble modernist sculpture called Triumph of the Human Spirit, which relates to the nearby African Burial Ground. The horizontal piece is meant to evoke a slave ship, the vertical piece an African antelope mask. This space was originally the Collect Pond, a freshwater source that was drained and filled in (1811). During the Victorian era, the immediate neighborhood was known as the rough and tough Five Points, a breeding ground for gangs that was immortalized in the novel and movie Gangs of New York. Hard to believe that this highly bureaucratic district was once so lawless.
From the south end of Foley Square (more of a triangle, really), walk northwest on Duane Street. The modern building on your right, with the huge glass windows, is the United States Court of International Trade. Just past it is 26 Federal Plaza, the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. (Javits was a longtime US senator from New York.) If you like 1960s space-age office buildings, you’ll love this one.Evoking a completely different era and mood are the green space and memorial to your left at Elk Street, the African Burial Ground National Monument. In 1991, during excavation for the construction of a government building, hundreds of graves were discovered; research determined the site to have been a major burial ground for enslaved and free blacks from the late 17th century into the 18th century. The current site, comprising a monument, burial mounds, and a visitor center, is supervised by the National Park Service. Granite structures, the Circle of the Diaspora and the Ancestral Chamber, are inscribed with signs and symbols that are significant to different African cultures, such as an Egyptian ankh, a Muslim star and crescent, and a Ghanaian sankofa.
Walk back on Duane Street to Lafayette
