The irregular lot just south of Times Square that is bounded by Broadway, Seventh Avenue, 39th and 40th Streets was the site of the original Metropolitan Opera House designed by J. Cleveland Cady and completed in 1883.  When the Lincoln Center cultural complex was designed in the 1960's, a new Metropolitan Opera House was designed as a centerpiece of that development by Wallace K. Harrison and completed in 1966.  The old opera house was demolished and replaced with a large new rectangular office building at 1411 Broadway in 1968, named the Fashion Center Building.  The building was intended to serve the businesses of what had been long known as the Garment Center district, an area developed during the nineteenth century and extending down to 34th Street.

The design of the new building followed conventional modernist urban planning of the day and was built without regard to the geometry of the site caused by the convergence of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The result was a barren triangle of concrete on the Broadway side of the building.

The Fashion Center Business Improvement District wished to work with the owners of the building to develop the space. The goal was to provide an urban amenity that would be more useful and pleasant for those working in the area, and which would also enable the Business Improvement District to develop a way of describing the history of the area and its transformation from Garment Center to Fashion Center.

Working with the Business Improvement District and the building owners, a plan was created for a seasonal transformation of the plaza into a Temporary Fashion Museum using planters, chairs, banners, and large architectural versions of the garment center trolleys used to transport clothing from one location to another.

These architecturalized “trolleys” are made of stainless steel and can be dismantled at the end of the summer for storage. They are designed to carry large fabric graphics describing the history and transformation of the area, and are designed to be connected to the planters. The resulting configurations can be varied to provide different kinds of seating enclosures that provide more intimate areas within the plaza, and also provide shade during lunchtime. The larger horizontal banners at the building facade provide a dramatic entrance to the building and shade the existing loggia.

The flexible arrangement of seating, planting and space-making trolleys allows for a great diversity of public use in the space, which is the only open space in the very dense Fashion Center District.  A contemporary inhabitation of the plaza is made possible, while at the same time a historical understanding of the area is provided.