Why Foley Square matters.
Foley Square is a consequential civic plaza where the Civic Center's judicial character meets broad public space, grand government architecture and layers of Lower Manhattan history embedded beneath the surrounding streets.
Set between Centre Street, Lafayette Street and Worth Street near City Hall Park, the square occupies a broad opening within an unusually concentrated district of municipal, state and federal buildings. Thomas Paine Park contributes lawns, tree cover, a plaza, fountain, garden and seating across 1.9 acres, giving the larger civic setting both paved assembly areas and planted ground. Granite surfaces and changes in elevation organize the principal plaza, with open sightlines carrying across the square toward the architectural walls surrounding it. Pedestrian paths cross the site from several directions, turning the open ground into both a passage through Lower Manhattan's government district and a gathering place large enough for major public events. The result is an unusually expansive civic clearing whose lawns, hardscape, trees, circulation routes and surrounding institutional scale make the physical organization of New York government immediately legible.
What defines Foley Square.
Foley Square is best known for occupying ground whose transformation from water and working-class neighborhood to civic center traces several major chapters in Lower Manhattan's development. Collect Pond once covered much of the surrounding area and supplied drinking water to colonial New York; Robert Fulton later used the pond for an early steamboat test before the city filled it by 1813. Poor drainage persisted beneath the reclaimed land, contributing to difficult living conditions as the Five Points neighborhood developed around a convergence of streets during the nineteenth century. Black New Yorkers, Irish immigrants and longer-established Anglo-Dutch working-class residents lived within this dense district, which combined inexpensive housing with employment near the commercial city. Civic construction gradually displaced much of that urban fabric as New York expanded its government institutions north of City Hall, and the area encompassing the present square entered the city park system in 1930. The square had received its name four years earlier for Thomas F. Big Tom” Foley, a local saloon owner and Tammany Hall district leader. A major redesign begun in the late 1990s unified six irregular open spaces, including the 1.5-acre Thomas Paine Park, into a five-acre civic landscape and rerouted seven surrounding street blocks. The three-year undertaking cost $18 million and reopened in October 2000, consolidating fragmented ground into the public square recognizable at the center of the Civic Center.
The architecture surrounding the plaza developed through a separate campaign that turned Foley Square into one of New York's densest concentrations of judicial buildings. Guy Lowell designed the New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre Street, which opened in 1927 after planning for the structure helped drive the broader civic-center scheme. Cass Gilbert received the federal courthouse commission in 1931 and answered the constrained urban site with a six-story base supporting a 30-story tower, an early federal skyscraper rising 590 feet beneath a steep pyramidal roof. Construction ran from 1932 through 1936, and the building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1987 before six historic courtrooms underwent restoration in 1992. The federal government renamed the courthouse for Thurgood Marshall in 2001, linking the building with the first African American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who served there from 1967 through 1991 after leading major civil-rights litigation as NAACP chief counsel. Nearby, William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White designed the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building after winning the final competition for a consolidated government headquarters; foundation work began in 1909, completion followed in 1914 and the $9 million building eventually accommodated nearly one million square feet of offices. Adolph A. Weinman's 25-foot gilded Civic Fame crowns its cupola, carrying a five-pointed crown representing the five boroughs consolidated into New York City. Foley Square occupies the center of an architectural campaign in which Lowell, Gilbert, Kendall and Weinman gave expanding city and federal institutions an imposing physical presence in Lower Manhattan.
How Foley Square fits.
Foley Square works as the anchor for a downtown outing connecting Chinese American cultural preservation, Eastern European Jewish immigration and the domestic history of successive immigrant families on the Lower East Side.
Begin at Museum of Chinese in America, whose institutional origins reach to the New York Chinatown History Project founded in 1980 by historian John Kuo Wei Tchen and community activist Charles Lai. The organization built a collection around Chinese American history before moving in 2009 from the former P.S. 23 schoolhouse at 70 Mulberry Street to 215 Centre Street, an old automobile garage redesigned by Maya Lin. Curators Cynthia Lee and Jack Tchen used the larger home to expand the core exhibition into With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America, giving the institution a permanent presentation of Chinese American history within blocks of Foley Square. Continue to Museum at Eldridge Street, housed inside the Eldridge Street Synagogue completed in 1887 as the first American synagogue purpose-built by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. More than 2.5 million Jews entered the United States between 1880 and 1924, and the building became a major religious center for immigrants from Russia, Poland, Lithuania and neighboring regions as the Lower East Side grew into an immense Jewish community. The congregation hired prominent cantors and appointed Rabbi Aharon Yudelovitch as its first full-time pulpit rabbi in 1918, then moved worship into the lower chapel during the 1940s as the main sanctuary deteriorated. Its rediscovery in 1986 initiated a 20-year, $20 million restoration that returned the sanctuary to public use. Conclude at Tenement Museum, founded in 1988 by historian Ruth Abram and social activist Anita Jacobson after they encountered the long-shuttered upper floors of 97 Orchard Street. German immigrant Lucas Glockner had constructed the five-story building in 1863 with 22 three-room apartments measuring 325 square feet apiece, and 7,000 people from more than 20 nations lived there between 1863 and 1935. The museum restored seven apartments and a lager beer saloon, using individual households such as East Prussian immigrants Nathalie and Julius Gumpertz to examine work, family life and economic hardship inside a surviving nineteenth-century tenement. The progression moves from a Chinese American institution shaped by Tchen, Lai and Lin through the restored religious architecture of Eastern European Jewish immigration and culminates inside Glockner's tenement, connecting three forms of cultural preservation rooted in communities that transformed Lower Manhattan.
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