One Police Plaza (often abbreviated as 1PP) is the headquarters of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). The building is located on Park Row in Civic Center, Manhattan near New York City's City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge. Its block borders Park Row, Pearl Street, and Police Plaza. 1PP replaced the NYPD's previous headquarters at 240 Centre Street, approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) north of 1 Police Plaza.
Video 1 Police Plaza
Description
Like Boston City Hall, 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 in 1973. 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 or any new employees to police headquarters, it does have 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.
Located on the eighth 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.
Inside 1 Police Plaza, a room on the second floor affectionately called "The Shack" serves as the police bureau office for local press outlets. Its tenants include the Associated Press, the Daily News, New York Post, The New York Times, Newsday, Staten Island Advance, El Diario La Prensa, NY1 News, and WINS Radio. Its police counterpart is on the 13th floor, the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information (DCPI). Also inside 1PP is the "Fourteenth Floor", the NYPD commissioner's office.
Maps 1 Police Plaza
Park Row closure criticism
Park Row, historically a major artery linking the Financial District to Chinatown and the Bowery, has been closed to civilian traffic since 2001. The NYPD asserts that this is necessary to protect its headquarters from a truck bomb attack. Chinatown residents are increasingly frustrated at the disruption caused by the closure of the thoroughfare, especially nearby residents. People who live nearby argue that the police department has placed a chokehold on an entire neighborhood and that if One Police Plaza is such an obvious terrorist target, perhaps it should be moved from a residential area. Members of the Civic Center Residents Coalition have been fighting the security perimeter around the building for years. Park Row reopened for use only by foot traffic and MTA buses in 2005, and those restrictions remain in place today.
The NYPD has stated that it will 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 reopening a stairway that skirts the headquarter's south side and leads down to street level near the Brooklyn Bridge. The department also plans to redesign its guard booths and security barriers to make them more attractive, and is involved in efforts to convert two lanes of Park Row into a pedestrian green-way.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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