The NYPD's previous headquarters, at 240 Centre Street between Broome and Grand Streets
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.[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 second 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]
One Police Plaza showing Tony Rosenthal 5 in 1, 1973–74 (plop art) Cor-Ten Steel sculpture
Park Row, historically a major artery linking the Financial District to Chinatown and the Bowery, has been closed to civilian traffic since 2001.[6] The NYPD asserts that this is necessary to protect its headquarters from a truck bomb attack. Chinatown residents were particularly frustrated at the disruption caused by the closure of the thoroughfare, especially nearby residents. People who live nearby argued that the police department had placed a chokehold on an entire neighborhood and that if One Police Plaza was such an obvious terrorist target, it should be moved from a residential area.[7] Members of the Civic Center Residents Coalition fought the security perimeter around One Police Plaza for years. Park Row reopened for foot traffic and MTA buses in 2005,[8] although only 200 buses per day were allowed on the street, and they had to pass through security checkpoints.[9]
In 2007, the NYPD stated that it would 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 by reopening a stairway that skirts the headquarters' south side and leads down to street level near the Brooklyn Bridge. The department also planned to redesign its guard booths and security barriers to make them more attractive, and was involved in efforts to convert two lanes of Park Row into a cycling and pedestrian greenway,[6] which opened in June 2018.[10]
