Yet Another Look in Store for Federal Plaza
By Carl Glassman
The swirl of green benches that for the past 13 years has dominted the public plaza of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building will be no more. Twenty-five-foot magnolia trees, marble backless seating, low-lying evergreen plantings and a fountain will provide the new landscape for the public space at Worth and Lafayette Streets.
The new design is courtesy of the federal government’s planned 12- to 18-month reconstruction of the plaza decking that its engineers say is settling, leaking and affecting the 41-story building at 26 Federal Plaza. The faulty plaza forms the roof of a parking garage below.
It is the same structural flaw that allowed for the current design, by landscape architect Martha Schwartz, when the leaky plaza was previously torn up and reconstruction began in 1992.
“One problem of the design is it’s got thousands of linear feet of seating. There is never anything that is going to happen in that plaza that all of those benches are going to be full,” said Matthew Urbanski, a principal with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the landscape architects assigned to the redesign. “So in a way it always feels like a failure because it’s always not full of seating.”
In a presentation to Community Board 1’s Seaport/Civic Center Committee last month, Urbanski said the new design, with its tall trees and “grand” stairs, will give the plaza a presence that it does not have now. Part of the problem, he said, is its elevation along Lafayette Street that appears uninviting at street level.
“There’s no expression of the plaza as a place. Would you even know to go there from back here?” Urbanski said, pointing to the park across Lafayette Street. “If you know about the park, good for you, but otherwise it’s up on top of this wall.”
Much of the design, Urbanski said, was influenced by the “microclimate” of the plaza, which receives too much sun in the summer and too little in the winter, plus a wind tunnel effect along Worth Street. The magnolia trees are positioned at the northern end of the plaza where they can provide shade and some shielding from winter winds.
“There are security issues like you wouldn’t believe,” noted Urbanski, who said that there must be clear views from a guard booth and remote cameras to every part of the plaza. Plantings will be low and cameras mounted on poles near the trees will provide views beneath the branches.
But there will no longer be light poles on the plaza. Instead, nighttime illumination will come from “moon” lights mounted on surrounding buildings that shine down in what Urbanski describes as a “calm wash of light.”
From the time it was completed, in 1969, the Federal Building and its bare, windswept plaza was the target of derision. “In a city of bad plazas in front of bad skyscrapers, this is one of the worst,” wrote former New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger. Time magazine called it “one of the ugliest public spaces in America.”
In 1981, Richard Serra famously presented “Tilted Arc” as his solution for adding aesthetic interest to the plaza. But the 128-foot-long, 10-foot-high Cor-Ten steel sculpture, commissioned by the General Services Administration, set off a storm of controversy that pitted the arts community against local residents and workers who claimed it impeded their movement through the plaza.
Unlike Serra’s sculpture, Martha Schwartz’s plan, with its maze of benches winding around six grassy mounds, has generated little criticism. In 1997 it received an Honor Award from the Society of Landscape Architects.
Still, the CB1 Committee seemed fine with seeing it replaced. During Urbanski’s presentation, one member was having trouble placing which plaza he was talking about. “Is that the one with the ugly green benches?” he asked.