page_title: Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse
section_title: Base
hierarchical_section_title: Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse / Design / Interior / Base
caption_attribution_description: New York County Courthouse in New York City
context_page_description: The Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse is a Classical Revival courthouse located at 40 Centre Street on Foley Square in the Civic Center neighborhood of lower Manhattan in New York City. The building, designed by Cass Gilbert and his son, Cass Gilbert, Jr., is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as U.S. Courthouse.
  The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York hear cases in the courthouse, which is across the street from the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York City.
context_section_description: The main hall spans the width of the building along its principal elevation. It is very similar in design and ornamentation to the main hall of the United States Supreme Court building, which Gilbert designed at the same time. Variations on the decorative motifs employed within the main hall appear throughout the rest of the interior. Twenty-nine feet in height, it has green- and black-veined white marble floors; the white marble that lines its walls has gold- and cream-colored veining, providing a subtle but attractive contrast of warm and cool tones. Elaborate molding, featuring a meander (Greek key) design, divides the ceiling into rectangular, coffered sections. The coffers are decorated with large plaster rosettes tipped with 22k gold leaf on alternating backgrounds of crimson and peacock blue, with smaller rosettes at the junctions of the coffers.
  Richly ornamental bronzework surrounds many of the interior doors, including those of the elevators. This bronze detailing features an unusual combination of metaphorical images related to law and government, including dolphins, an erudite if somewhat obscure symbol of birth and democratic ideals. Among the other motifs are grasshoppers apparently feeding on stalks of wheat, accompanied by the Greek word meta, meaning "to transform", which conveys the idea that change, even conflict, is essential to growth; there are also owls, representing wisdom, and acorns and oak leaves, signifying strength and endurance.
  The building contains 35 courtrooms. Sixteen are original to the courthouse: five in the base and eleven in the tower, including the historic United States Court of Appeals courtroom. All have wood-paneled walls with colossal round arches and fluted Ionic pilasters; the Greek key molding seen in the main hall also enframes the ceilings of the tower courtrooms. The Court of Appeals courtroom ceiling also depicts nautical symbols.
caption: The colonnade of Corinthian columns
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