Foley Square Courthouse (today the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse), 1936. The Classical Revival courthouse at 40 Foley Square was designed by Cass Gilbert, and finished by his son, upon Gilbert's death in 1934. Completed in 1936, the colonnade entrance on Foley Square fits in well with its neighbors, including the Municipal Building and the New York County Courthouse. The imposing main tower is set back from the base and rises 20 stories to a pyramidal roof. One of the first federal skyscrapers constructed, it was originally called the Foley Square Courthouse. In 2001, the United States Congress passed a bill renaming the building in honor of Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court Justice, who had sat on the resident Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the early 1960s.

Often thought of as a "concrete jungle," New York City also has a rich history of environmental activism--from the creation of green spaces to confronting climate change. In the decades following the first Earth Day in 1970 and the birth of the environmental movement, New Yorkers sought to make their city greener with recycling centers, community gardens, and bike lanes. Activist groups also called for improved environmental conditions and air quality that disproportionately affected people of color. Though the city is less polluted today, climate change has posed large challenges that have ignited a new generation of environmental activists. Explore key sites of eco-advocacy in the city from the 1960s to today.

Timbering below street level for construction of the BRT Centre Street Loop, July 31, 1911. Above street level, the steeple and church facade belong to the Church of St. Andrew at the intersection of Duane Street and City Hall Place. Today, these streets have been de-mapped with the plaza where they once ran part of the judicial complex at the eastern side of the Manhattan’s Civic Center. The church building pictured dates to as early as 1812, and was known as Carroll Hall, a meeting place for the Congregational Society of United Christian Friends denomination, until 1842, when it became the Church of St. Andrew. The church, just a short distance from the offices of the city’s major newspaper became known as the “printers’ church,” after Father Luke J. Evers established a 2:30am mass in 1900, accommodating the late hours of printers at work on morning editions. By the late 1930s — by which point St. Andrews was dwarfed by the adjacent U.S. Courthouse by Cass Gilbert — the structure’s condition had deteriorated, and construction started on a new church on an overlapping site. The original church was razed in 1938. The Centre Street Loop, was an early 20th century project connecting lines running over the Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bridge, thereby providing Manhattan transfer for the various Brooklyn lines terminating at Park Row and reducing the need for trains reversals at bridge terminals. The Center Street Loop connection to Brooklyn Bridge lines was not completed as planned. Instead, the Centre Loop connected to the companion Nassau Street Loop (designed to provide a similar service for Manhattan Bridge trains). Together, the remaining tracks form the BMT Nassau Line (J/Z trains) with extraneous loop tracks presently out of service.

A walking tour through Lower Manhattan's skyscraper canyons and more than a century of high-rise construction. This walk focuses on the buildings around City Hall. This story is adapted from the Skyscraper Museum's "Ten Tops" exhibition.

Cass Gilbert's final work, the United States Courthouse was completed by his son two years after his death in 1934. It is arguably the last classically themed skyscraper built in New York, which Gilbert used to reflect the building’s function as a public federal building. While the thirty-eight story, 590 foot tall tower lacks the rich ornamentation of earlier work, such as the Woolworth Building, or 90 West Street, its pared-down decoration seems more appropriate for a court of law. The building’s shaft emerges from a six-story classical colonnade, decorated with sculpted American eagles. The tower culminates in a dramatic gilded terra-cotta pyramid roof topped by a lantern. For security reasons, the building's interior is not accessible to the public unless on court business.