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JPMorgan Chase has done to Downtown what Occupy Wall Street couldn’t: It booted the public from a public park.
Bank chairman Jamie Dimon doesn’t see it that way. His lawyers claim Chase Plaza, open to all citizens for more than 50 years until 16 months ago, is private property (indisputably) which the bank’s under no obligation to share (laughable given that the plaza was created for the public as part of a deal to erect a tower that violated city zoning rules).
If a court swallows the JPMorgan Chase argument, we can thank the nation’s largest bank for unconscionably punching a black hole in the fabric of the Wall Street district. Call it stupid and graceless. Also ungenerous, un-civic and un-neighborly to hundreds of thousands of office workers and residents of lower Manhattan.
It affronts the spirit of public-private tradeoffs which have made New York a better place to live and work. Yet elected officials and the media, with the notable exception of the Village Voice’s Nick Pinto, have mostly been silent.
Of course, civic conscience might not weigh heavily on an institution with $2 trillion in assets, and for which the $6.2 billion trading loss incurred by its London “whale” didn’t cost Dimon more than a few antsy minutes before a Senate panel.
And since JPMorgan Chase didn’t see the need to inform regulators and investors of the cash drain until it was too late, why expect it to be more forthcoming about a mere fence with a few pesky journalists?
In November 2011, after relentless pressure from this newspaper, City Hall finally routed the “We are the 99%” anarchists, nihilists, squatters and petty criminals who had taken over 99% of Zuccotti Park. The NYPD moved in just days after I’d likened Mayor Bloomberg’s hands-off approach until then to David Dinkins’ ignoring the Crown Heights riots 20 years earlier.
But like many a diabolically effective terrorist campaign, the OWS takeover catalyzed a wildly disproportionate overreaction. Without a word of explanation, JPMorgan Chase shuttered Chase Plaza, which owing to its central location and longevity is far more integral to the neighborhood than Zuccotti Park.
The bank fenced off the 2.5-acre plaza, bounded by Nassau, Liberty, William and Pine streets, in mid-September 2011. It did so just in time to thwart a “General Assembly” gathering OWS had planned there; the protestors then picked Zuccotti instead.
JPMorgan Chase later denied OWS had anything to do with the closing. But in light of the squalor and havoc the squatters brought to Zuccotti, the bank might well have been justified in protecting the plaza and its landmarked office tower above it.
That, however, was 16 months ago. OWS is finished. Were its scattered remnants to try anything similar, they’d be crushed instantly by the NYPD and the move would be upheld by the courts as they were after Zuccotti.
Since the barricades went up, a mood of oppressive enclosure has fallen over FiDi’s heart. Chase Plaza served as the neighborhood’s lungs. Well-proportioned and welcoming, graced with two fine works of sculpture — Isamu Noguchi’s “Sunken Garden” and Jean Dubuffet’s “Group of Four Trees” — it provided workers and residents their only oasis from the steel and concrete jungle.
The loss is particularly felt along claustrophobically narrow Pine Street, from which pedestrians ascended a few gracefully scaled steps onto the plaza’s main expanse. But the damage is all around.
What makes the closing a singular stroke of chutzpah is that the plaza, and the understanding it would be open to everyone, was central to the deal that allowed predecessor company Chase Manhattan to build the skyscraper above it.
In the 1950s, the city was desperate to stanch the flight of large banks from the Wall Street area to Midtown. City officials agreed to waive height and design rules so the bank could put up the 60-story headquarters.
Both to establish a suitable platform for the tower and to let sunlight penetrate the area’s tight canyons, two blocks were combined into a single “superblock” by eliminating Cedar Street between Nassau and William streets.
But the sloping superblock, elevated on three sides, would form a barrier to pedestrians and to motorists who previously took Cedar Street through the site. The plaza was meant to make up for the nuisance, and it did maybe better than planners expected, serving as an alfresco stage platform for musical performances, food festivals and casual everyday lounging and people-watching.
At the tower’s 1961 dedication, Chase president David Rockefeller himself praised the decision to “clear an open plaza on some of the city’s most valuable land and throw it open to the light of the sun — and the public.”
Now, though, JPMorgan Chase claims all the understandings reached during years of negotiation and construction amounted to mere rhetoric without legal clout.
What a thumb in the eye of the heroic district which rose from the ashes after 9/11.
JPMorgan Chase last July blamed the fencing on construction. It told disbelieving residents of Community Board 1 the closing was needed to fix severe leaking and the plaza would reopen by spring 2013.
The degraded granite and plumbing clearly needed work. But the job appears to be going nowhere. Recent visits found a handful of workers and on one visit, none at all.
Much of the surface has been uprooted and the negligible pace recalls early years of wheel-spinning at Ground Zero.
This week a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson told us, without elaboration, “Construction has been delayed.”
New York can be a tough place to build. Hurricane Sandy might be a factor. But you’d think an institution with real-estate holdings around the globe, and the confidence to propose building itself a 42-story “beer-belly” tower cantilevered over a church near Ground Zero a few years ago, would get the job done at a faster pace than at a stalled outer-borough project owned by first-time developers.
More ominously, the bank is now denying it has any obligation ever to let the public back in.
In a motion to dismiss a suit against it in federal court — a convoluted case filed by OWS, City Council member Ydanis Rodriguez and some journalists, and also naming the city and other nearby landlords as defendants — the bank says that neither the understandings between Chase Manhattan and the city, nor the fact the public has had free use of the plaza since 1961, amounts to “an obligation to keep the plaza open to the public.”
Its argument is that Chase Plaza is not a “privately owned public space” of the kind established by 1961 zoning because it was built before then. Therefore, the bank says, it made the space available in the past entirely on a “voluntary” basis which in no way requires it to do so in the future. It has a constitutional right, it says, “to exclude the public from the plaza.”
That stinks to no end. The bank said it can’t comment on a pending court case. But if the court decides history means nothing, it would set a dangerous precedent.
Why couldn’t a future owner of Rockefeller Center close Rockefeller Plaza and the Channel Gardens, which are similarly privately owned and also predate the 1961 rules?
JPMorgan Chase has every right to defend itself against looney claims of a neofascist conspiracy to stifle free speech. The all-over-the-map suit accused it and the other defendants of multiple offenses including denial of First Amendment rights and police misconduct.
But threatening never to reopen the plaza is not the act of a responsible corporate citizen, but of a global institution blind, deaf and dumb to the city it calls home.
It ironically achieves what OWS wanted: irreparable damage to the capital zone of free enterprise. Which side is Jamie Dimon on?
scuozzo@nypost.com