text: Plaza A large plaza,  beneath street level, was designed by landscape architect Sasaki Associates and built along with Citicorp Center. The plaza's presence was encouraged by the 1961 Zoning Resolution, which gave additional floor area to New York City developers as a zoning "bonus" for including open space outside their buildings. While many developers took advantage of the "bonus", the New York City Planning Commission found in 1975 that many of these plazas ranged from "bleak, forlorn places" to those that were "forbidding and downright hostile". In response, the City Planning Commission's Urban Design Group was formed in 1967 to determine how to improve plaza designs, influencing a design handbook that the City Planning Commission published in 1975. The design of the Citigroup Center's plaza was finalized in 1973, and it included many of the same features described in the handbook, such as an outdoor plaza, a covered pedestrian area, and an arcade running for a city block.
  The plaza has an area of . Under the zoning laws, its presence allowed the tower to be designed with a maximum floor area ratio of 18:1, higher than the 15:1 ratio specified for the area. The plaza is accessed by a diagonally-oriented stairway extending northeast from the corner of Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street. On the south side of the plaza is an entrance to the Lexington Avenue/51st Street subway station. The Citigroup Center's entrance replaces two previous subway entrances on the sidewalk. The north side of the plaza contains the entrance to St. Peter's Church. During the plaza's construction, the developers collaborated with the numerous public agencies that had a stake in the project, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operated the subway station.
  The plaza, interior shopping concourse, and sidewalks all initially contained brown brick floor pavers. There was, originally, also a fountain at the center of the plaza, which was designed to conceal noise from the environs, similar to the fountain at nearby Paley Park. That fountain was demolished in 2017.