The New York County Courthouse - 60 Centre Street

 

photograph by wallyg

Twenty-two architects submitted designs for a new New York County Courthouse in 1913.  Guy Lowell, a Boston architect, won the competition with his "round building."  On April 19, the Real Estate Record & Builders' Guide remarked that the substantial commission came with side effects.  "Mr. Lowell will have about two thousand working and detail drawings to prepare, and it will be necessary for him to engage a larger force of draftsmen and larger quarters."  The article added that from his $200,000 fee, about $130,000 of that would be eaten up by "office expenses."

The journal explained that the winning design would now go to "the Court House Board and their architect, Walter Cook," for approval.  That process would initiate the first domino to fall in a long string of disappointments and delays.  On June 21, 1913, the Record & Guide reported, "The justices of the Supreme Court rejected on Tuesday...Mr. Guy Lowell's court house plan."

The borough president invited a committee of five architects to suggest "modifications" to Lowell's circular plan.  They handed Lowell a number of suggested sketches and he subsequently "prepared modified sketches."  Nearly a year later, on May 16, 1916, the Record & Guide reported on the "modified design for the courthouse," saying that the exterior of the building was "only slightly changed."

Real Estate Record & Builders' Guide, May 16, 1914 (copyright expired)

Lowell's task was, by no means, finished.  On April 24, 1913, the Record & Guide reported that the courthouse site had been "amended."  The article noted, "Guy Lowell, the architect, is to have the revised plan of the building ready by May 1.  He has a large force of draftsmen at work."

The revised Courthouse site.  Real Estate Record & Builders' Guide, April 24, 1915 (copyright expired)

But red tape, construction costs, and a world war continued to retard the process of erecting a county courthouse.  Then, on November 29, 1919, seven years after Guy Lowell's initial design was accepted, the Record & Guide wrote, "Final action has been taken, after years of effort, upon the plan for a new County court house in Manhattan.  Radical changes, however, will be made in the structure in size, layout, and in cost."

Lowell's original plans projected the cost at between $15,000,000 and $20,000,000 (about $372 million in 2026 terms).  The article said, "The new court house is expected to cost about $6,000,000 and its completion is looked for in about two years.  It will be hexagonal in shape."  Lowell's revised design was "on a less elaborate scale."

Lowell released the revised downscaled rendering in December 1919.  Record & Guide December 20, 1919 (copyright expired)

The new hexagonal design provided for 32 courtrooms for the Supreme Court and ten for the City Court.  "The new Court House will be built of the same excellent materials and will have the same carefully worked out conveniences as the building originally planned," explained the Record & Guide on December 20, 1919.  The article detailed:

The entire exterior, including the porch, will be of granite of a warm tone.  A fine porch or portico will occupy the westerly one of the six sides, giving character and dignity to the building...The other five sides, occupied by the courts, depend for their architectural effect on careful composition--produced by the skillful balancing of void and well space, so that there are no columns or architectural projections to shut off light from the court room windows.

Excavation for the foundation had started in 1918, a year before that article.  And yet Lowell would have to make one more significant change.  On September 4, 1920, he explained in a letter to Fiorello La Guardia, president of the Board of Aldermen, that the granite--a part of the plans since 1913--was now too expensive to use.  He said in part, "we cannot afford all the enhancement that we could allow ourselves some years ago."  Explaining that limestone would be "$600,000 less than the available granite bid," he suggested the former material.  He said, "You see that, though I would have liked granite, I have not allowed my personal preferences to supersede my real wish, which is to give the city the best we can for the money."

Construction was once again delayed by an obstacle that never should have happened.  On November 23, 1920 the Washington D.C. Evening Star reported that the cartage firm Holland & Co. "began dumping ashes in the New York county courthouse excavation in February 1918, and continued doing so until recently."  Now, said the article, the city would have to spend "nearly $400,000 for removal of these ashes so that construction can be begun."

The dignified building sat alone upon its completion in 1927.  photograph by Wurts. Bros from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

In February 1927, 14 years after Guy Lowell first sat before his drafting table and two weeks after his death, the New York County Court House was completed.  The Record & Guide said, "From the porch a collonaded [sic] lobby on the first or main floor leads to the central rotunda."  It and that lobby, said the article, "are paved with marble and have limestone columns and dado."  

The Supreme Court rooms were on the third and fourth floors.  The fifth and sixth floors were set back "leaving a space which can be used as a terrace."  Those levels held the upper part of the two-story library, the justices' reading room, dining room, justice's chambers and such.  "Each Justice's chambers consists of a small vestibule, a secretary's room, and the chamber proper," explained the Record & Guide.

The first floor plan.  The Real Estate Record & Builders' Guide December 20, 1919 (copyright expired)

The costly structure came with a restriction taken for granted today, but highly unusual in 1920.  On March 17, The New York Times reported, "Warning cards against smoking, such as are posted in factories, on which the penalties for violations are printed, confronted attorneys and others having business in the new New York County courthouse yesterday."

An outgrowth of the Great Depression was the Works Progress Administration, which provided jobs to out-of-work Americans.  One segment found work for artists, who suddenly found themselves decorating the walls and ceilings of civic buildings throughout the country.  Included in the massive project were the decorations of the corridors, rotunda, courtrooms and assembly rooms of the New York County Courthouse.

On July 26, 1934, the Springfield Weekly Republic quoted critic Edward Alden Jewell, who panned Attillio Pusteria's new foyer murals in the New York County Courthouse as too traditional.  

The ceiling of the foyer, decorated by Attilio Pusteria.  photo by Peter Vanderwarker from the collection of the Historical Society of the New York Courts.

He said they were "precisely the decorations one would expect to find beyond the massive Corinthian columns of the portico" and complained that they represent the "inevitable allegories, such as Justice, Judgement, Mercy and Enforcement."  Jewell grumbled that American artists were being forced "to paint in the manner of Raphael."

The rotunda with its inlaid marble floors, limestone columns and 1934 dome decoration.  photo by Peter Vanderwarker from the collection of the Historical Society of the New York Courts.

Another group complained about the decoration.  But, unlike Jewell, they were not indignant about the artistic rendering, but about one particular image.  On December 19, 1936, The Detroit Tribune reported that "after a protest had been made by Harlem leaders," the Municipal Art Commission had agreed "that the WPA mural in the New York County Courthouse showing a colored man eating watermelon was 'frivolous,' and said the offending picture would be erased and something else substituted."

The New York County Courthouse became, of course, the scene of hearings and trials from the mundane to the most sensational.  In September 1938, Tammany District Leader James J. Hines, accused of "selling political protection to the underworld," was prosecuted by fledgling District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey.  Hines smugly walked out of the courthouse surrounded by a throng of reporters on September 12.  The Washington D.C. Evening Star explained that the judge "ordered a mistrial yesterday on the grounds that the youthful prosecutor by a verbal slip had 'fatally prejudiced' the jury against the white-haired political boss."

And on December 20, 1952, The New York Times began an article saying, "The man generally considered the most feared figure in the underworld was the principal witness at yesterday's hearing into waterfront conditions by the State Crime Commission.  He was Albert Anastasia, and his defiant appearance on the stand was the most dramatic incident of the hearings to date."

When the New York County Courthouse first opened, one of its elevator operators was Dominick Lupiano, a 48-year-old immigrant from Italy who had run an elevator in the old courthouse building for several years.  Decades later, the Washington D.C. Evening Star would say that he and his wife, Roselle, "scrimped" to put their son, Vincent, through law school.  On one occasion, State Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner, Sr. mentioned to Lupiano, "One day, Dominick, you may be taking one of your own sons up to his own chambers.  In this country anything is possible, you know."

Lupiano retired after 40 years of service.  But the now-84-year-old came back on January 4, 1955.  That day Vincent A. Lupiano was sworn in as a justice of the State Supreme Court.  The Evening Star said:  "After the swearing-in ceremony, Dominick Lupiano donned his old elevator operator's uniform cap with a flourish.  Beaming, he escorted Justice Vincent Lupiano to the elevator and took him upstairs to his chambers."

Another set of high profile trials was held here in 1970.  Sixteen members of the Black Panthers were tried on "charges of conspiring to bomb Manhattan department stores, the Bronx Botanical Gardens, police stations, subway switching-rooms and railroad tracks," said The New York Times on February 1.  (The trials ended with mixed guilty pleas, murder convictions and dismissed charges.)

In March 1988, the restoration of the rotunda mural, Law Through the Ages, was initiated.  Somewhat surprisingly, The New York Times reported that the project "is being paid for by lawyers and judges in the building."

photograph by Beyond My Ken

Guy Lowell's dignified and stately Roman Classical style structure has not only been the venue of serious legal trials, but it has inspired producers throughout the decades.  The broad exterior staircase and monumental columns have appeared in countless movies and television shows.  And it remains a crucial element in the architectural personality of Foley Square.