Encyclopedia
The
United Nations headquarters is a distinctive complex in
New York City that has served as the headquarters of the
United Nations since its completion in 1952. It is located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, on the east side of
Manhattan, on spacious grounds overlooking the
East River. Though it is in New York City, the land occupied by the United Nations headquarters is "international territory", and its borders are
First Avenue west, East 42nd Street south, East 48th Street north and the
East River east.
FDR Drive passes underneath the Conference Building of the complex.
International character
The complex includes three major buildings: the Secretariat , the General Assembly building , and the Dag Hammarskjöld Library. A small, fourth building, the Conference Building, is situated between the General Assembly and Secretariat buildings, and can be seen only from FDR Drive or the East River. The complex is also notable for its
gardens and outdoor
sculptures.
The United Nations headquarters building was constructed in New York City in 1949 and 1950 beside the East River on land purchased by an 8.5 million dollar donation from
John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. The land remains the territory of the United States. However, the site of the United Nations headquarters has extraterritoriality status like embassies do. This affects some law enforcement where UN rules override the laws of New York City, but does not give immunity to crimes that take place there. In addition, a few members of the UN staff have
diplomatic immunity and so cannot be prosecuted by local courts unless the diplomatic immunity is waived by the Secretary-General. In 2005, Secretary-General
Kofi Annan waived the immunity of Benon Sevan, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Vladimir Kuznetsov in relation to the Oil-for-Food Program. All have been charged in the US Federal Court of New York, except for Kofi Annan's own son, also implicated in the scandal. Benon Sevan later fled the US to Cyprus, while Aleksandr Yakovlev and Vladimir Kuznetsov decided to stand trial.
It is sometimes incorrectly stated that the famous "beat their swords into plowshares" passage from the
Book of Isaiah is inscribed on a wall at the U.N. headquarters building. In fact, the inscribed Isaiah Wall is in
Ralph Bunche Park, a New York City municipal park across the street from the U.N.
The complex has a street address of 760 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017, USA. For security reasons, all mail sent to this address is sterilized, so items that may be degraded should be sent by courier . The
United Nations Postal Administration issues stamps, which must be used on stamped mail sent from the building. Journalists, when reporting from the complex, will not use "New York" as the identification of their location in recognition of the extraterritoriality status. For example, Richard Roth is
CNN's UN correspondent, while Ian Williams is his counterpart at
The Nation, and Carola Hoyos is the UN correspondent for the
Financial Times.
Proposed alternatives
San Francisco,
Chicago,
Philadelphia,
Flushing Meadows Corona Park in
Queens, and even the
Black Hills of
South Dakota were all proposed as sites for the United Nations headquarters before Manhattan was finally decided upon.
In 1945-6
London hosted the first meeting of the General Assembly in Methodist Central Hall, and the Security Council in Church House. The third and sixth General Assembly sessions, in 1948 and 1951, met in the
Palais de Chaillot in
Paris.
For the first few years, the UN was headquartered at a temporary location in Lake Success, New York, an eastern suburb of
New York City on
Long Island. The Security Council has also held sessions on what was then the
Bronx campus of
Hunter College .
Prior to the choice of the site in
New York City,
Navy Island near
Niagara Falls in
Ontario,
Canada was proposed as an alternative headquarters for the United Nations . An international committee pitched the site as the "World Peace Capital" over 1945 and 1946. The island was considered to be an ideal location as it lay on the boundary of two peaceful bordering countries. It was proposed that Navy Island would be ceded to the United Nations as long as the headquarters remained, and to revert to the Canadian government should the U.N. move. The proposal was ultimately turned down in favor of the current site in New York City.
Since the Headquarters buildings are in need of repair, it has been suggested that a new temporary site be created at the old Lake Success location.
Brooklyn has also been suggested as a temporary site. Another alternative for a temporary headquarters or a new permanent facility is the
World Trade Center site.
Hugo Chavez has repeatedly suggested the headquarters be moved from its current location in an "imperialist nation" to his homeland,
Venezuela. This proposal has no serious traction within the general assembly or the UN.
Architecture
Rather than announce a competition for the design of the facilities for the headquarters, the UN decided to commission a collaborative effort among a multinational team of leading architects. American architect
Wallace K. Harrison was named the director of planning, and a board of design consultants was nominated by member governments. The board consisted of N.D. Bassov of the
Soviet Union, Gaston Brunfaut/
Belgium,
Ernest Cormier/
Canada,
Le Corbusier/
France, Liang Ssu-cheng/
China,
Sven Markelius/
Sweden,
Oscar Niemeyer/
Brazil, Howard Robertson/
United Kingdom, G.A. Soilleux/
Australia, and Julio Villamajo/
Uruguay.
The committee considered 50 different designs before arriving at a decision. The basis for the final design was based on Le Corbusier's design, known as "scheme 23A."
Bound by such constraints as the East River Drive and the
East River, it became necessary to build a high-rise office building for the secretariat. The 39-story Secretariat Building was controversial in its time but became a modernist landmark. Its characteristic east-west walls were fully covered with thermopane glass designed to absorb heat from sunlight, except for air intakes on the 6th, 16th, 28th and 39th floors. The north-south walls are covered with
Vermont marble.
Per an agreement with the New York City government, the buildings meet some but not all local fire safety and building codes. The construction was financed by an interest-free loan of $65 million made by the United States government.
Renovation plans
In recent years, however, the headquarters buildings have come to need extensive renovation, including the need to install sprinklers, fix leaks, and remove asbestos. A renovation plan was announced in 2000 involving the building of a temporary headquarters on what is now a playground across the street from the current facility. Once renovations were finished, the temporary building would be used to ease overcrowding at the UN's DC-1 and DC-2 office buildings, providing more space for UN specialized agencies such as UNDP. However, due to the refusal of the
federal and
New York state governments to fund the project, little has been accomplished as of 2006. , , , ,
In fiction and film
The building has a distinctive appearance in
North by Northwest is a 1959 [i] MGM [i] thriller [i] by Alfred Hitchcock [i] and is generally consi ...
; a shot in the building's cavernous lobby was simulated through creative use of a matte painting.
In
The Pink Panther Strikes Again is the fifth film [i] in the Pink Panther [i] series and continues th ...
, the building is destroyed by a
disintegrator ray.
The Art of War is a Chinese [i] military [i] treatise [i] written during the ...
-- starring
Wesley Snipes,
Donald Sutherland,
Anne Archer, and
Michael Biehn -- details the activities of a UN covert operations force investigating the assassination of the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations. The climax of the film takes place in the Secretariat building.
The Interpreter -- released in the spring of 2005, directed by
Sydney Pollack, and starring
Sean Penn and
Nicole Kidman -- was the first movie to be filmed inside the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council buildings. The filming took place at night, when the buildings were not being used for official business. Pollack felt that the movie could not be filmed any place but the real UN Headquarters.
In
The Peacemaker, terrorists plotted to destroy the UN HQ by detonating a stolen Russian nuclear warhead.
Is featured in the black-and-white film noir,
The Glass Wall. The building is the "glass wall" mentioned in the title.
Dating back to the first issues of 1951 the buildings have frequently appeared on United Nations
postage stamps. The
Marc Chagall stained glass wall was also the subject of a
souvenir sheet in 1967.
Due to its international status, the United Nations Headquarters is often used as a symbol for the human race and the planet as a whole:
- The headquarters complex is a major setting in The Animatrix is a collection of nine animated [i] short film [i]s set in the fictional universe [i] ...
: The Second Renaissance, with key events in the film taking place in the General Assembly and the Security Council Chamber. Towards the end of the first part of the two-part film, the United Nations and their unwillingness to accept the mechnical nation of Zero-One as a charter member represents mankind's hostility towards the machines . At the end of the film, the headquarters is destroyed by a small nuclear device hidden inside Zero-One's mechanical ambassador. In this role, the ruined Headquarters complex is used to represent the human civilizations of Earth, which collapse into ruins following the Man-Machine War. - In the computer game Half-Life 2 is a science fiction [i] first-person shooter [i] computer game [i] ...
, the complex is shown on the front page of a newspaper during the Seven Hour War. In the photograph, the Headquarters complex is badly damaged and is under attack from Combine forces. In this case, the ruined and embattled Headquarters complex symbolically represents the whole planet, which is suffering the same fate during the brief war.
See also
External links
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- overview from UN 60th anniversary pages
