Bollards to Ring Another Downtown Bank Deemed a 'High-Risk' Target

Bollards like these, which ring the Citi headquarters on Greenwich Street, are proposed to protect the Bank of New York Mellon down the street at 240 Greenwich Street. The stanchions would be 3-feet high and placed 4 feet apart. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Update 7/7/23: In its resolution, the full CB1 board later voted to oppose the current design and request that the bank return with an alternative design that would accomplish the same security goals but be more aethetically pleasing to the community.

“Bollards, bollards, bollards around the entire square block is not what I call publicly friendly.” 

That was Community Board 1 chair Tammie Meltzer’s response to a plan by the Bank of New York Mellon, at 240 Greenwich St., to ring its property along the curbline, between Murray and Barclay Streets, with the 3-foot-tall stainless steel stanchions commonly used to protect buildings that are deemed potential terror targets. The NYPD has called the building one of those “high risk” properties, according to the bank. Concrete planters now provide protection for much of the building.

Bank representatives came to CB1’s Transportation and Street Activity Committee this month for its advisory approval of a security plan that had been called for after the attacks of 9/11. By one vote, the committee okayed the request, with backing by its chair, Betty Kay. 

“I’m going to go with owners rights. I think they have a right to choose how they choose to [protect] themselves,” Kay said. “Bollards are not unusual in the area. I asked people who were visiting what they thought of them and none of them even saw them. So they weren’t offended in the slightest.” 

“That’s good for them. I have a different take on it,” responded Meltzer, who is not a voting member of the Transportation Committee, saying that based on design principles she will vote against the plan when it comes before the full board later this month. Eric Yu, a committee member, also spoke against it. “It seems overwhelming,” he said, “almost like you’re moving the building property line out into the street.”

The bollard installation is part of a larger plan by the bank that includes the transformation of a 7,000-square-foot lot behind the bank building at Murray and West streets into a plaza called Alexander Hamilton Place. Additional seating and greenery would be installed around the bank building. That plan, introduced to Community Board 1 in January 2021, came with an application to formally privatize the building’s privately owned public lobby, with its dramatic glass-topped atrium. Later approved by the city, that part of the plan was overwhelmingly rejected by CB1, as was its desire to ring the bank property with bollards. The board “strongly urged” the bank to create a secure area with “plantings and other landscape elements.”

At the committee meeting this month, Katie Havener, a Stantec civil engineer on the project, argued that planters are a worse option. Based on an analysis of the surrounding roadways and the acceleration speed of a vehicle, she said, the building required the highest of three levels of protection. “If we have to achieve a 3-foot minimum height [of protection],” she said, “now you’re creating a planter wall that oftentimes can be more restrictive.” 

A bank representative said that installation of the crash barriers, to take place in phases, is expected to begin in August and take a year to complete,