It would be an understatement to say that Lower Manhattan has undergone radical change over the last hundred years. But the construction of the World Trade Center, September 11th, and the subsequent revitalization of the area is only one piece of the story. Once upon a time, Lower Manhattan was home to more than 300 vibrant electronics businesses, known as Radio Row. And Washington Street was once the home to Little Syria, the biggest Arab-American community in the country at the time.
Matt Kapp looks at the rich and ever-shifting history of that part of Manhattan, picking out pivotal moments and tracing a line from 1919 to today in his new book, A Century Downtown: A Visual History Of Lower Manhattan. He looks at the rise of Wall Street and Newspaper Row, the battle between FDR and Robert Moses, the construction of the Twin Towers and the communities it offset, 9/11 and the battle to control its legacy, and the current economic boom. We asked Kapp a few questions about the development of the area below. (You can check out photos from across the century above.)
Why did you decide to begin the story of Lower Manhattan in 1919? What's the significance of that period to the story you're telling of the area? 1919 was a pivotal year in the history of the country and of downtown in particular. The book opens with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks hawking Liberty Bonds to a huge crowd on Wall Street during World War I. By raising $343 billion in today’s dollars for the war effort, the bonds would play a key role in the Allied victory in Europe, helping to convert the United States from a debtor to a creditor nation for the first time and paving the way for Lower Manhattan to assume the mantle of financial capital of the world from London’s Square Mile. The U.S.’s involvement in the war was literally crowdfunded by millions of Americans in the form of Liberty Bonds. Can you imagine the U.S. government starting a Kickstarter campaign today to fund an invasion of Iran?
The aftermath of the Wall Street Bombing of 1920
What was the legacy of the Wall Street Bombing of 1920 on the area? Did the neighborhood bounce back immediately or did it scare people away from it? Wall Street bounced back from the attack not within years, or months, but literally overnight. The Stock Exchange board of governors wouldn’t have it any other way. Cleanup crews worked all night, and in the process likely swept away any evidence that might have helped identify the terrorists, who were never apprehended. The directive was to go to work next day “with head up and teeth set,” as the Sun put it, to show the world that no terrorist attack could disrupt the Street. And indeed it didn’t: the next day the stock market hit a six-week high. It might sound a bit cynical, but there you have it.
What was Radio Row, and what happened to it and all the workers there? It seems like an entire industry was bulldozed overnight. Radio Row was home to the largest concentration of electronics businesses in the world, employing some 30,000 workers. It’s main drag was lower Cortlandt Street, in the middle of where the 9/11 Memorial sits today. In 1962, the governors of New York and New Jersey announced plans for a “World Trade Center” to be built smack-dab on Radio Row. But the shop owners, led by Oscar Nadel of Oscar’s Radio, didn’t go without a fight. In one memorable protest, a mock funeral procession, Nadel was carried up and down Cortlandt Street in a makeshift coffin. By 1967, there was nothing left of the neighborhood.
How was Little Syria, a thriving community of Arab-Americans, displaced? And how was Robert Moses involved? Robert Moses wanted to build a soaring bridge to connect Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, while his old nemesis, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, preferred a tunnel, which he felt would be less vulnerable to attack. Few and far between were politicians willing to cross Moses. But this time he wasn’t just up against Roosevelt. A formidable coalition of community groups, civic leaders, preservationists, and Wall Street executives warned that a bridge would “seriously disfigure” the city’s most “world-renowned feature.”
In the end, the only one able to stop Moses was the Secretary of War, Harry Woodring, who scuttled plans for the bridge because it was “seaward of a vital naval establishment,” the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Not a frivolous request with World War II just over the horizon. What was left of Little Syria was razed during the war to make way for the tunnel’s entrance ramps. Just three buildings from the original neighborhood remain.
The early (negative) reviews of the Twin Towers seems to mirror the ways skyscrapers are written about today. Do you think there's a cyclical nature to the reception of architectural design in the city? Do people reject innovation initially out of nostalgia/protectiveness over the city they grew up in? Yes, I think to a certain extent they do. New Yorkers are fiercely territorial and proud about their city. Maybe one day they’ll love Hudson Yards. But for now, most of them hate it as much as they hated the Twin Towers in the beginning, which they called “glass and metal filing cabinets,” “a pair of middle fingers,” “arrogant twins,” and “the largest aluminum siding job in the history of the world,” among other digs.
Yet as the towers became “humanized” by daredevils like Philippe Petit and George Willig, and later in movies and TV shows, New Yorkers’ collective opinion of them thawed a bit. And of course, after 9/11 there was intense sentimentality toward them among New Yorkers and people all over the world. But the “superblock” was just never a good idea. New Yorkers are finicky and outspoken about design, as any urban dweller should be, or it’d all look like one of those awful new master-planned Chinese cities, and who would want to live in a place like that?
There's a lot in the book about the efforts to rebuilt after 9/11. What did you think of the competition to redesign the WTC, and the winning pick? Well, the process began democratically enough when the L.M.D.C., with the help of the public, narrowed 406 applicants from around the world down to seven then two finalists: Daniel Libeskind and Rafael Vinoly. The L.M.D.C. site-planning committee voted unanimously for Viñoly’s plan, but the next day Governor George Pataki overruled them. What’s ironic is how similar the final design looks to the six original “concepts” that the L.M.D.C. had rather undemocratically commissioned from the design firm Beyer Blinder Belle and which at a public feedback forum one attendee said “all look like Albany.” Ouch! It was that particular comment that L.M.D.C. committee chairman Roland Betts says led to the design competition.
Architect Michael Arad's sketches of "Reflecting Absence"
If NYC is judged not by the monuments saved but by those destroyed, as Ada Louise Huxtable said, what are the worst losses for Lower Manhattan over the last century? And what are the most important preserved buildings? I don’t think Lower Manhattan has suffered a historic-preservation loss along the lines of the original Pennsylvania Station, which is what Ada Louise’s legendary remark was referring to. Radio Row, while once a bustling business district, didn’t have the historic significance of, say, the Seaport District, which was designated an official historic district in 1977. But we all have to be diligent. The Woolworth Building, which Paul Goldberger called “the Mozart of skyscrapers,” is a remarkable example of historic preservation. It wasn’t granted landmark status by the city until 1983, but that didn’t keep its owner from sparing no expense in lavishly and continually restoring it. Ditto the Equitable Building, which has been meticulously renovated multiple times by Larry Silverstein. Walking into its lobby feels like time travel.
The last third of the book is given over to the Lower Manhattan of the present, and the new boom in major projects down there. There is a sense that things are better than ever in the area. But the very final chapter is about threats of climate change on Manhattan. Is the city prepared for the next Sandy? As one South Street business owner recently remarked in the Times, “Six years of studying it and you come up with sandbags? Really?” Enough said.
