A few days ago, I mentioned the (old) New York County Courthouse in passing, and it’s a building that is worth a longer look. Despite its dignified architecture, it is usually referred to as the Tweed Courthouse, and its entire history has been caught up with that of William M. Tweed. It is now both a designated city landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.
New York City needed a new courthouse in the mid-1800s, and the narrow strip of City Hall Park north of City Hall was a convenient place to put it. The project, like nearly every city-run project in the 1860s, became a way for Tammany Hall insiders to steal money. The system used to steal during the construction of the courthouse was surprisingly simple: contractors (on request from insiders) submitted inflated invoices for their work, which were approved by insiders, and the contractors then kicked back most of the overage to the insiders. The contractors made money, the insiders made a lot of money, and the building, slowly, was built at a far higher price than it should have been. The scandal that brought down Tweed and his associates was far broader than the courthouse, but exposure of the courthouse thievery to the public played a major role in his downfall.
A lot of the excessive bills were for finishes and trim – plaster, painting, carpet, cabinetry, and so on – where the insiders could claim that they were paying for quality and complexity. The exterior, while built of fine masonry, was not noticeably different than other public buildings of its era and was, obviously, visible to the public. Here’s the portico being constructed in 1870, shortly before the scandal broke:
The irony of the vast sums of money supposedly spent on the interior is that the interior is notable for being architectural restrained and for having a large open atrium where more rooms might otherwise have been constructed. (That atrium was used as a stage set for an insane asylum in the movie Dressed to Kill, and shows up as itself, under a fake name, in the video game “Max Payne.”)
For a long time, the city government seemed embarrassed by the building, and plan after plan for modernizing the architecture of the civic center began with tearing down the courthouse. It survived that, and the widening of Chambers Street, although it was rather run down by its hundredth anniversary: in an era when well-loved buildings were receiving deferred maintenance, a building seen as a monument to corruption received almost none. It was finally restored about twenty years ago, including getting back the portico steps that had been removed in the street widening.
Putting aside its architectural merits, the courthouse is an example of a building that can serve as a negative monument. It was not a boondoggle, in the sense that a courthouse was needed and this served as one until its restoration (it is now the home of the city’s Department of Education), but it has symbolized municipal corruption for almost 150 years. I would not defend saving a monument to corruption or any other crime, but I think there’s merit to an otherwise neutral building that serves as a monument about the crime.
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