For weeks, Courtroom 1530 was the stage for the world’s loudest court case. On Friday, it was just another room.
Inside, three court officers sat on chairs surrounding a clerk, who typed quietly on a keyboard. Outside, the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse had returned to its usual hush.
The day after Donald J. Trump became the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a felony, the scene that had transpired in 1530 had seemingly already been forgotten by lawyers, judges and defendants who were facing more important dramas: their own.
“Trump was here? Why?” said Walter Dickerson, 27, a Bronx resident charged with violating a protection order. “I stay in my own little bubble. All I know is I don’t want to be here.”
Described incessantly in recent weeks as grungy, smelly and dim, the courthouse retains echoes of its former grandeur, including signs in curvy Art Deco font for the restrooms and the hollowed-out concavity on the first floor that once held pay phones. The building, completed in 1941, has shed such ornamentation under a crush of criminal cases — nearly 9,500 in just the first three months of this year, including 917 violent felonies like murder and rape.
In this building, everyone paid attention to the trial of a the former president charged with the tedious crime of falsifying business records. Just feet away, cases involving the most lurid violence trudged on barely noticed by the broader world.
On Friday, two floors below the room where Mr. Trump was convicted, Tyrese Haspil sat in Courtroom 1324 accused of killing and then beheading Fahim Saleh, his former boss and the chief executive of a Nigerian delivery company, in 2020.
The charges were shocking, the proceedings mundane. There was no line of reporters waiting at dawn to watch a prosecutor spend 10 minutes entering evidence into the court record, including surveillance videos of Mr. Haspil walking around a 7-Eleven on Delancey Street.
Upstairs, in Courtroom 1602, a prosecutor played body camera video of a police officer arresting Ronald Branch, who faces a charge of second-degree murder. When he was arrested in a parking lot on East 106th Street on July 15, 2022, Mr. Branch was bleeding from his left wrist. A police officer testified that a switchblade and a box cutter were found nearby, both covered in blood.
“Would you say that Mr. Branch was bleeding profusely?” Jason Goldman, Mr. Branch’s defense lawyer, asked a police officer in court.
The judge in Mr. Branch’s case is Robert Mandelbaum, whose courtroom is on the 15th floor. But because the entire floor has been sealed off for weeks by the Secret Service and the Police Department, the case has moved among three different rooms.
On Monday it will move again, to Justice Mandelbaum’s regular court, as the building quickly returns to normal.
“Jurors don’t like to get lost, and they don’t like to be late,” said Mr. Goldman, who is arguing that his client killed in self-defense. “I’m glad we’ll be in one courtroom for the rest of the trial.”
Everywhere in the courthouse on Friday, people seemed to be catching their breath. Alain Massena, a criminal defense attorney, had avoided the courthouse as much as possible the past six weeks, because walking the labyrinth of police barricades was such a hassle just to reach the building’s front door.
“I was only coming here on Wednesdays, when I knew Trump wasn’t here, and only when I had to,” said Mr. Massena, 48. “I’m happy that we’re getting back to normal.”
Anthony Smith, 54, a resident of Park Slope who works as a researcher for a private investigator, said he had found the number and intensity of police commanders on duty inside the courthouse during the Trump case to be intimidating.
“It felt like I was on trial,” Mr. Smith said. “The officers here were really aggressive during the trial. Today it was so pleasant going in. Everyone is more relaxed.”
Friday’s calm extended to the building’s staff.
“With the Secret Service, the police and all the lawyers, it meant a lot more trash,” said Cornelius Sharper, 37, who has worked as a janitor at the courthouse for 15 years. “I prefer it like this, nice and quiet.”
