5 in 1 is a large painted Cor-Ten steel sculpture by Tony Rosenthal on the brick pedestrian mall at 1 Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan’s Civic Center. Commissioned by New York City in 1971 and assembled in 1973–74, it consists of five interlocking discs that stand about 35 feet high and measure roughly 28 by 42 feet. The whole work weighs about 75,000 pounds; each disc weighs about 15,000 pounds. At the time it was installed it was described as the largest metal public sculpture in the city.
Rosenthal titled it as a metaphor for New York’s five boroughs—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—joined as one. The discs lock together so the piece reads as a single, dynamic form rather than five separate objects. He originally specified a red paint finish in his maquette. Budget limits left the raw weathering steel exposed at first; graffiti later became a maintenance problem, and the sculpture was eventually painted the intended bright red, which also completed the artist’s design.
The commission cost $80,000, with another $20,000 for installation after a dispute over who would pay that unforeseen expense. The money came from a $150,000 art budget attached to the new Police Headquarters. Assembly required cranes to lift and bolt the discs into place; Rosenthal was on site photographing the process. The work has since become a familiar backdrop in films and television.
The artist
Bernard J. Rosenthal (August 9, 1914 – July 28, 2009), known professionally as Tony Rosenthal after about 1960, was an American sculptor whose career spanned seven decades and more than 100 public works. He was born in Highland Park, Illinois. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago as a teenager, earned a B.F.A. from the University of Michigan in 1936, worked as a studio assistant to Alexander Archipenko, and later studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art with Carl Milles, where he also knew Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen.
His first public commission was the figurative A Nubian Slave for the Elgin Watch Company building at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. After World War II service (he commanded a topographic-model unit), he produced figurative and decorative work, especially in Los Angeles. In the 1960s, encouraged by dealer Sam Kootz, he shifted to geometric abstraction in steel, bronze, and aluminum—cubes, discs, rings, columns, and interlocking planes—often at architectural scale. He stressed that sculpture should interact with people: they should walk around it, see through it, or, in the case of Alamo, push it.
Alamo (1967), the 15-foot painted Cor-Ten cube at Astor Place, is his best-known work and the first postwar contemporary sculpture purchased by New York City. 5 in 1 was his second major Manhattan commission; he ultimately had five public pieces in the borough. Other well-known works include Rondo (near the New York Public Library on East 58th Street), Steel Park, and pieces in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Miami, Ann Arbor, and elsewhere. Museums including MoMA and the Whitney hold his work. He continued making sculpture into his nineties and died in Southampton, New York, at 94.
Rosenthal’s public pieces are typically bold, geometric, and site-specific. 5 in 1 is a clear example: a civic-scale emblem of the city’s five parts locked into one form, placed where people pass through the plaza every day.
Tony Rosenthal: 5 in 1 / 1 Police Plaza, New York City. September 12, 2026.
