Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza serves as a living memorial to the second Secretary-General of the United Nations. In 1961, the year he died in a plane crash while on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo, the city of New York renamed this stretch of Forty-Seventh Street in his honor. He remains the only person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously, a recognition of his proactive and often daring approach to international diplomacy. The plaza functions as a symbolic gateway to the nearby United Nations headquarters, standing on land that was once occupied by industrial slaughterhouses before the area was transformed for the international organization in the late nineteen forties.