Nearly four years after it was painstakingly restored by Architecture Research Office (ARO), the Beaux Arts pavilion at the north end of New York City’s Union Square finally opened to the public in May. Delayed by a lawsuit over its use, the open-air building serves as a restaurant from May through October and then as a multiuse space for educational and community activities the rest of the year. Critics of the project said a commercially-operated restaurant was inappropriate in a public park, while supporters countered that it would enhance the mission of Union Square’s four-day-a-week greenmarket, serving dishes made from ingredients bought there. The restaurant also provides the city with rental income ($300,000 for the first year and sliding up to $450,000 at the end of the 15-year lease, according to The Daily News) that can be used to maintain the park. Commercially-operated restaurants such as The Boathouse Café and the newly reopened Tavern on the Green have been fixtures in Central Park for many years.
When ARO was hired by the city parks commission and the Union Square Partnership in 2007, the pavilion was in “awful shape,” says Stephen Cassell, one of the firm’s principals. “Much of the limestone was buckling and some of the steel was severely rusted,” he notes. Built in the early 1930s as a bandstand and often used as a speaker’s rostrum for public events, the structure faced south, toward the rest of the park. From the 1990s to 2006, an outdoor restaurant, Luna Park, operated from a pair of shed-like structures backing up to the south side of the decaying pavilion. “We had to take apart much of the building, then put it back together,” says Cassell. For example, the architects stripped the pavilion’s Ionic columns of their limestone capitals, inserted new stainless steel in the structure, then put the original stone back in place.
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