Stock Exchange's Two-Ton Security Shutter Raises Landmarks Concerns
The 18 Broad Street entrance to the New York Stock Exchange, with stainless steel panels above the door. In the event of an attack, a heavy security gate would drop down, closing off the entrance. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
A new fortress-like steel entry to the New York Stock Exchange may be immune to explosives, but not the verbal blasting it got last month from Community Board 1.
Stainless steel plates are now installed above the Exchange’s entrance at 18 Broad Street. And on each side of the entrance to the 1903 landmark building are heavy steel mechanisms used to raise and lower a 4,000-pound “security shutter” that only becomes visible when in use.
Put in place a year ago with a temporary permit from the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the apparatus replaced a non-historic transom and grate that had been installed following the 1982 bombing by terrorists seeking Puerto Rican independence.
Eugene Travers, a lawyer representing the Exchange, told the committee that his client wants to make the new installation permanent. But the committee, which is advisory to the ultimate decider, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, told Travers that the Exchange should find another solution.
“You need to make it [historically] contextual and then figure out a way to incorporate your security procedures into what it should be,” said committee member Marc Ameruso.
The New York Stock Exchange “is an incredibly important feature of our city and this is just a desecration,” said Corie Sharples, another committee member and principal in the firm of SHoP Architects.
Sharples insisted that the apparatus could be set further back into the building and made less visible. “It makes no difference if someone is trying to get in this building with a bomb,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re six inches further into the perimeter, it really doesn’t. I mean, don’t tell me that it matters.”
“You’re looking at a non-historic entry that’s being replaced with an equally non-historic security system,” Travers argued.
The committee voted to reject the application and recommended that the Exchange renew its temporary permit while it looks for another way to secure the entrance. The Landmarks Commission was scheduled to consider the installation on April 1.
“The problem is that this type of device has to be at the exterior skin of the building for it to be effective,” said the project’s architect, Curtis Taufman of American Defense Systems, Inc., in a telephone interview with the Trib. “If I could have done it differently, I would have.” Taufman said he would have attended the meeting, but was not asked.
“Even if we desired to pull it inside, a lot of modification would have had to be done to the building and to the lobby to get the same type of reinforcement,” he added, saying that many alternatives had been considered.
“As an architect, I am very, very sensitive to maintaining our landmarks, but I’d been taught in school that our first concerns were life and safety.”
Taufman said plans for the security shutter last year had only Buildings Department approval and was days away from installation when the Landmarks Commission discovered it had been overlooked in the approval process.
“A lot of effort went into this under the impression that it was approved,” he said.
CB1’s Landmarks Committee was unhappy that it was a lawyer and not the architect, as customary, who presented the plans to them. Travers was unable to answer technical and aesthetic questions about the project, and committee members said it was difficult to understand the Stock Exchange’s position without that expertise.
“The New York Stock Exchange, they govern themselves differently,” the architect said. “I think they just didn’t want to talk that much about the details.”