Rheinhold Martin has described the Seagram Building plaza as a “tragic space from the point of view of human interaction”. My proposal for a newsstand/coffee shop invigorates this quasi-public site by connecting the various levels of a complex vertical network that the plaza conceals: commuter parking below the plinth, the limousine and taxi parking on Park Avenue, the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks and in the elevators, the subway station and Four Seasons restaurant below grade. My inspiration was a split-second experience of apparent freedom that accompanied my defying the insistent grid of Manhattan by crossing the intersection of the east (northbound) side of Park Avenue and 53rd Street at a diagonal, in the absence of a pedestrian crossing signal.