The Destruction of Lower Manhattan

. . . is the title of both an recently-opened exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York and of the recently-reissued a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576872327/amerartplas-20">book of photographs on which the exhibition is based:

In late 1966, Danny Lyon returned to New York City, having just finished The Bikeriders. He was twenty-five. Living in a loft on the corner of Beekman and William Streets in Downtown Manhattan, Lyon saw that half the buildings on Beekman Street were boarded up, about to be demolished. That year an incredible sixty acres of mostly nineteenth-century buildings were slated for demolition, all below Canal Street. The seven-acre site where the Twin Towers would eventually stand was being cleared, a new ramp added to the Brooklyn Bridge, Pace University expanded, and the Washington Market was being moved to the Bronx. Whole sections of Lower Manhattan were being turned into rubble.

Sixty acres! What a sight it must have been -- a vast, utterly abandoned Civil War era cityscape in the heart of lower Manhattan.

Another recent writeup in the NY Times.

Posted by David on June 25, 2005 12:03 PM