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From the early 20th century through 1970, plans were in place to build a major highway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, across Broome Street in SoHo. The project gained renewed life in the 1950s and 60s thanks to the efforts of David Rockefeller and the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, who saw the highway as supporting development of the Lower Manhattan financial district. The project’s ultimate failure allowed SoHo to develop as an artist colony and, in time, a gentrified neighborhood. Yet, the project’s slow death also depressed property values, allowing artists to obtain loft space, which also drove the area’s residential transition.

Chapter 4 analyzes the process of long-term post-crisis redevelopment in each city. The chapter first explores the complex forms of crisis framing and political intervention, including the historic upsurge of civic engagement, coalition building, and social movement formation, from the grassroots to elite levels. Next, it examines how political mobilization by newly created public-private partnerships—the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Louisiana Recovery Authority—attempted to co-opt and neutralize grassroots attempts to influence the elite policymaking process. It then analyzes the form, trajectory, and problems of redevelopment in the two cities, with special emphasis on the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, the Liberty Zone, the Gulf Opportunity Zone, and tax-exempt private activity bonds to finance and promote reinvestment. Chapter 4 shows that New York’s post-crisis redevelopment may be seen as a prototype and New Orleans’s as the first test case for the application of market-centered principles and spatial strategies to guide the institutional response to major urban disasters.

This chapter focuses on the historical event known as 9/11, particularly on the shapes this event has taken in lower Manhattan. The concept of an event eddy is introduced. This concept captures the ways that events can get caught in uncertain oscillations of forms and flows, including, in the case of 9/11, monument construction, legal trials, civil sphere institutional initiatives, and residential reconfiguration. The chapter details how 9/11 got caught in the event space of lower Manhattan for the decade after the terrorist attacks. It also analyzes the sedimentation of this historical event in and as official categories, documents, laws, and symbols. For example, the 9/11 Commission Report is analyzed as a document in which challenges of description, categorization, and evaluation are met within constraints of documentary and pictorial genres of representation.

This chapter examines the role played by historic preservation, especially of South Street Seaport, in the development of Lower Manhattan. It considers the two megaprojects being that were developed at opposite ends of Fulton Street and how they reshaped Manhattan after 1966: the World Trade Center and South Street Seaport. It also explains how the debate over Schermerhorn Row set the context for much of Gotham's attitudes about historic preservation. In particular, it discusses the role of Sol Atlas and John McGrath in shaping the Row's fate, along with Emery Roth, Uris Brothers, and Jakob Isbrandtsen. Finally, it explores the controversy surrounding the Manhattan Landing plan and its significance for the proposed South Street Seaport Museum. It describes Seaport's restoration through private funding as a model for creative urban planning.

This chapter examines the third stage in the ongoing reciprocal relationship between space and social relations in Battery Park City. In the first stage, people shaped space; in the second stage, space shaped social relations. In the third stage, people shaped space once more as they organized to influence the physical design of the neighborhood that previously influenced them. This chapter looks at how residents of Battery Park City used space as a tool to maintain the exclusivity of their neighborhood and to preserve existing social privilege. It also shows how residents sought to influence redevelopment plans for Battery Park City, the World Trade Center site, and Lower Manhattan that would reproduce the exclusivity of their neighborhood and community in physical form. Resident attitudes about urban redevelopment illustrate the reciprocal relationship of space and social relations while also revealing the problems—the use of suburban spatial strategies to defend residential inequality—inherent in the contemporary “citadel.”

This chapter examines the impact of 9/11 on the South Street Seaport Museum's historic preservation plans. In 2001, the Seaport received an initial $5 million to rehabilitate Schermerhorn Row and exhibit “World Port New York,” which was expected to open in 2003 and boost Lower Manhattan's tourism. But the terrorist attacks of 9/11 changed everything, crippling Lower Manhattan for years. This chapter considers Robert “Peter” Neill III's retirement as Seaport president in the wake of 9/11, Seaport's strategy of increasing revenue under executive director Paula M. Mayo and chairman Lawrence S. Huntington, and how 9/11 affected the Seaport's Fulton Fish Market and its historic ships such as Wavertree and Peking. It also assesses the Seaport's future prospects.

This introduction focuses on the South Street Seaport Museum in Lower Manhattan, New York City, and its efforts to preserve the historic district of South Street Seaport. It considers the historic preservation movement that emerged following the demolition of Pennsylvania Station that began in 1963. In particular, it discusses the efforts of Peter M. Stanford, who formed the Friends of South Street Maritime Museum to jump-start the proposal of state senator Whitney North Seymour Jr. to establish the New York State Maritime Museum at the Schermerhorn Row. It also examines the Friends' vision for the South Street Seaport, such as creating a fleet of historic ships, to be called “Street of Ships,” on the East River. Finally, it highlights the problems faced by the South Street Seaport Museum in its crusade to preserve the port and its history.

This chapter focuses on the translation of deprivation into practical intervention programs targeting children from low-income African American homes. It notes that these programs explicitly attempted to counter the perceived sensory deprivation caused by the “impoverished environment” of poor black homes as well as maternal deprivation attributed to inadequate mothers. It evaluates compensatory education programs developed in the early 1960s and then turns to Mobilization for Youth, a community action program active in the early and mid–1960s on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

At 6 o’clock on a weekday evening in early July, Union Square is most alive. The small, oval park at its center, three acres of green nestled between four broad streets, throbs with music and conversation, with voices rising and swelling to join the steady drone of traffic on all sides. You see children swinging under their parents’ eye in small playgrounds on the park’s northern edge; at the southern end you pick your way carefully through a swarm of a couple hundred young men and women who are milling around the wide, shallow stone steps leading up to the park’s main entrance. Tourists browse the T-shirt and art vendors’ tables while other shoppers stop at the Greenmarket on their way home, and every fifth person in the crowd is making a call or reading a text message on their cell phone. The crowd skews young, mostly under thirty-five, their faces are mainly white but also black and brown and several shades of tan, and you hear a girl ask, “Where are you? Are you in front?” in Japanese on her phone. Next to the subway entrance a lone political demonstrator uses a portable loudspeaker to make a speech against the U.S. president; nearby, under a statue of George Washington on horseback, two New York City police officers, also on horseback, interrupt their early evening patrol to chat with a park cleaner in a bright red uniform and a private security guard in navy pants and a matching cap. So many people are sitting on green wooden benches under the trees that you can hardly find two seats together. Most of the occupants are watching the parade of passersby; some are listening through earbuds to portable music players, others read a book, and one or two doze. In the fenced-in dog run, pets frisk about while their owners laugh and talk. A trio of young musicians sits on benches in the middle of the park, setting up a cello and two violins for an informal outdoor rehearsal.