1 Police Plaza

Like Boston City Hall, One Police Plaza is rectangular in plan and is an inverted pyramid in elevation. It is a 13-level, horizontally-oriented brutalist building designed by Gruzen and Partners in 1973.[1] A 22,000-square-foot (2,000 m²) expansion project was completed in 2011. Although the project did not add any new floors to the building, it did add new computers and equipment. Angry Lower Manhattan residents held a rally on August 27, 2008 near One Police Plaza to protest the addition, and tenants of three neighboring co-ops filed a lawsuit to force the NYPD to undergo environmental and land use reviews.[2]

Located on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza is the Real Time Crime Center, an anti-crime computer network which is essentially a large search engine and data warehouse operated by detectives to assist officers in the field with their investigations. The Major Case Squad and the Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) are also located at 1PP.[3]

Inside 1 Police Plaza, a room on the second floor affectionately called "The Shack" serves as the police bureau office for local press outlets. Its tenants include the Associated Press, the Daily News, New York Post, The New York Times, Newsday, Staten Island Advance, El Diario La Prensa, NY1 News, and WINS Radio.[4] Its police counterpart is on the 13th floor, the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information (DCPI). Also inside 1PP is the "Fourteenth Floor", the NYPD commissioner's office.

Park Row, historically a major artery linking the Financial District to Chinatown and the Bowery, has been closed to civilian traffic since 2001.[5] The NYPD asserts that this is necessary to protect its headquarters from a truck bomb attack. Chinatown residents are increasingly frustrated at the disruption caused by the closure of the thoroughfare, especially nearby residents. People who live nearby argue that the police department has placed a chokehold on an entire neighborhood and that if One Police Plaza is such an obvious terrorist target, perhaps it should be moved from a residential area.[6] Members of the Civic Center Residents Coalition have been fighting the security perimeter around the building for years. Park Row reopened for use only by foot traffic and MTA buses in 2005, and those restrictions remain in place today.[7]

The NYPD has stated that it will not be moving despite the numerous complaints from residents, explaining that they had tried to alleviate the impact of the security measures by forbidding officers from parking in nearby public spaces and reopening a stairway that skirts the headquarter's south side and leads down to street level near the Brooklyn Bridge. The department also plans to redesign its guard booths and security barriers to make them more attractive, and is involved in efforts to convert two lanes of Park Row into a pedestrian green-way.[5]

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  1 Police Plaza showing the 5 in 1 (plopart) sculpture by Tony Rosenthal
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  The NYPD's previous headquarters, at 240 Centre Street between Broome and Grand Streets