Barnett Newman Triangle

White Street between Church Street and Sixth Avenue

What was here before?
In 1926, Sixth Avenue was extended south as part of the Holland Tunnel’s construction. Thousands of people were displaced and numerous buildings demolished to make room for the extension, including a residential building on this site. The avenue’s terminus at Franklin Street created this traffic island.

How did this site become a park?
This triangle is part of the Greenstreets program, which is a joint project of NYC Parks and the NYC Department of Transportation. Beginning in 1986, this initiative converted paved street properties, such as triangles and malls, into green spaces.

The site was named for Barnett Newman (1905-1970) in 1999 through a competition initiated and run by local newspaper The Tribeca Trib in cooperation with Community Board 1 and elected officials.

Who is this triangle named for?
Barnett Newman, one of the foremost painters of the "Abstract Expressionist" era and a pioneer in "color field" painting, occupied a studio in the building across the street at 35 White Street from 1968 until his death in 1970 at the age of 65.

Newman was born on the Lower East Side and attended public schools in the Bronx and Manhattan. He later recalled skipping high school classes to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As a high school senior Newman took drawing classes at the Art Students League, where he studied through 1930. It was there that he met Adolph Gottlieb, who would become part of a group of avant-garde artists with whom Newman was associated in the 1940s and 50s. Newman enrolled in 1923 at City College.

From 1931 to 1939 Newman worked as a public school substitute teacher, and in 1933 ran for Mayor as a write-in candidate with a manifesto titled, "On the Need for Political Action by Men of Culture." In 1940 he taught evening art classes at the Washington Irving Adult Center on Irving Place, while studying botany, ornithology, and marine life.

The 1940s saw Newman engaged in art criticism and continued political activism and developed with others “Abstract Expressionism.” In 1948 he painted the Onement I, which he later considered a breakthrough in his career, as it was the first of many where he used a vertical band (later dubbed a "zip") to divide the canvas.

Newman's first solo exhibition was held in 1949 at the Betty Parsons Gallery. His widening artistic circle during this time included Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Newman and his fellow artists issued an open letter protesting the bias of the Metropolitan Museum towards modernist art, and the group was dubbed the "irascible eighteen" in a Life magazine story in 1951.

Criticism of Newman's artwork was mixed in the 1950s but improved in the early 1960s. In 1958 the Museum of Modern Art included his work in the traveling show "The New American Painting." Beginning in 1960 Newman painted a series of stark, minimalist paintings composed of black "zips" on raw canvas titled "Stations of the Cross," featured in his first solo museum exhibition, organized by Lawrence Alloway at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966. A late series, "Whose Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue," 1966-70, made bold use of pure, primary colors in asymmetrical configurations.

Over several decades Newman occupied various downtown studios, moving to his last at 35 White Street in 1968. In the late 1960s he experimented with triangular canvases, perhaps reinforced by the view from his studio window. One of his best-known works was a fragmented cor-ten steel sculpture, Broken Obelisk (1967). The piece was part of an inaugural group exhibition of 24 contemporary artists in city parks and public plazas, titled "Sculpture in Environment.”

The year after his death in 1970, he was honored by a posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.