Tweed Courthouse, ca. 1975.

The Old New York County Courthouse is better known as Tweed Courthouse, for the infamous Tammany Hall political boss who oversaw its funding (and the rampant kickbacks associated with construction costs).

The massive Italianate courthouse, designed by architect John Kellum, quickly ran over its initial budget, with inflated materials costs used to fill Tammany coffers.

In 1873, twelve years after the cornerstone was laid and two years after original architect Kellum's death, Tweed was convicted of embezzlement in an unfinished courtroom.

Tweed's trial and imprisonment ground construction to a halt. Though architect Leopold Eidlitz was hired in 1874 to complete the courthouse interior and design a new wing, work did not resume until 1876. When Eidlitz's Romanesque south wing was completed in 1881, it was initially unpopular and considered incongruous to Kellum's Renaissance Revival design.

For all its notoriety and expense, the Tweed Courthouse's utility as a civic structure was relatively short-lived. By the turn of the 20th century, the courthouse's association with political graft led politicians and press alike to call for its demolition, often as an element of redevelopment proposals for City Hall Park.

When the new New York County Courthouse was completed in 1927, City Court operations shifted to the imperiled Tweed Courthouse. Over the next two decades, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses each called for the structure's removal. Still, the Tweed Courthouse survived, albeit without its grand entrance stairway, a casualty of the 1942 widening of Chambers Street.

In 1984, the Landmarks Preservation Commission recognized both the historical and architectural significance of the long-unpopular courthouse in its designation as a New York City Landmark. A lengthy restoration project commenced in 1999, with the Giuliani administration declaring that the courthouse would become the new home of the Museum of the City of New York. The Bloomberg administration reversed these plans, instead determining that the Department of Education would become the next long-term Tweed tenant.