In 1944, a social misfit finds a new home amongst Pershing Square’s “ever-shifting group of people,” while a business association campaigns to transform the park into an underground parking garage.

Unafraid is adapted from the observations of Jim Kepner, a founder of the gay rights movement who passed his time in the Pershing Square of the 1940s, and a 1945 parking study by the Downtown Business Men’s Organization that spearheaded the building of a garage under the park. Plans for the 2000-car garage and a new surface park were performed by the project's only bidder, the streamline moderne architect Stiles Clements.

Pershing Square, 1951

Garage concept, 1950

Surface concept, 1950

Surface design, 1951

Garage design, 1951

Garage, 1954

Escalator building design, 1951

Escalator building, 1954

Surface, 1954

4. Unafraid