The Cracks in City Hall Park

Abroad in New York

By FRANCIS MORRONE
June 7, 2007

In 1998, the city renovated City Hall Park, the most historic open space in Manhattan. Mayor Giuliani had made the renovation a pet project. Part of his plan was to prove that such an undertaking could be carried out in a timely and efficient manner. He wanted it to be a model for future city renovation projects of the type that traditionally had been plagued by construction delays.

Nine years later, a reappraisal seems in order.

Department of Parks and Recreation landscape architect George Vellonakis took charge of the project. City Hall Park had been drab and uninviting. It sits at a crucial site. On its north side is City Hall, a glorious building erected around 1811. The Municipal Building towers majestically over the northeast corner of the park. On the east stretches the Brooklyn Bridge, its pedestrian boardwalk accessed right across Centre Street. On the south stand several historic buildings once part of Newspaper Row. At the southwest rises the Woolworth Building.

Huge numbers of cars, subway trains, and pedestrians converge at City Hall Park, making it, like the Concourse of Grand Central Terminal, a "mixing chamber," as some planners say, a node that gathers then disperses large numbers of people. As a historic site, a mixing chamber, and the only green oasis for blocks around, City Hall Park bears heavy responsibilities.

Two fine sculptures stand in the park. On the east side we find John Quincy Adams Ward's seated figure in bronze of Horace Greeley, the legendary publisher and editor of the New York Tribune. Frederick MacMonnies's bronze statue of Nathan Hale announces the first thing not quite right with the park.

For many years the statue occupied an awkward but accessible site just inside the park from Broadway, facing out. Mr. Vellonakis smartly relocated the statue so that it faces City Hall on axis from just across the plaza in front of the building. It's a stirring composition, potentially one of the best things in the city. I say potentially, because, well, we can't actually see Hale, and can't get close enough to him to study the marvelous details wrought by one of America's master sculptors. Mr. Giuliani made the plaza, along with City Hall itself, off limits to the uninvited public. I admire Mr. Giuliani, but closing off City Hall struck me then, as it strikes me now, as perverse. City Hall is, to use a cliché, the "people's house." The mayor inhabits it at public sufferance. I understand the need for security. But in the case of the Hale statue, since when does the mayor have the right to take one of our most noble works of public art and place it where he, but not we, may see it every day? That is just wrong, and it casts a pall over the whole renovation project. On a better note, as Gary Shapiro reported in The New York Sun in March, other parts of the northern part of the park that have been closed since the Giuliani administration will reopen later this year.

In other respects the renovation hasn't held up well. The fences are in bad shape. Cracks in the stone base look to me like an expensive restoration project for which, so far as I can tell, no funds have yet been allocated. Also, the informative historical texts and images set into the pavement show much wear after years of being trod upon. I've seen such work that's held up better and wonder, as with the fence, if perhaps corners weren't cut to meet the mayor's stringent deadline for completion of the restoration.

Happily, the dominant feature of the park is its fountain. The park got the fountain, designed by the redoubtable Jacob Wrey Mould, creator of Central Park's Bethesda Terrace, in 1871. In 1920, when extravagant Victoriana had become deeply unfashionable, the fountain went to Crotona Park in the Bronx. The basin is the original, recovered from the Bronx. The gas jets ringing it date from 1998, when they were cast from Mould's designs. The fountain gives to the Civic Center a desperately needed meeting place, a focal point, for pedestrians. Thanks to the talented Mr. Vellonakis, City Hall Park's gone a long way, if not all the way, to fulfilling its responsibilities.

fmorrone@nysun.com