In 1967, more than 60 acres of buildings were demolished in Lower Manhattan to make way for redevelopments including the World Trade Center, a process documented in photos by Danny Lyon now on exhibit.
I walked over to the Museum of the City of New York this afternoon and checked it out. I’d never been to this museum before and after having been to the park and the dog run named after him, it seemed serendipitous that there should be a larger-than-life statue of DeWitt Clinton standing outside, rebuking me stiffly for poking fun at him.
It’s one of those museums that used to be an old house, handsomely built of red brick, renovated and well-kept, with pleasantly creaky floors. On my way to it, a few blocks south, I walked past the Guggenheim and noticed it was swarming with summer tourists, so I feared equally dense crowds at the city museum. But the there were only a handful of elderly patrons that looked as if they could die at any moment and become part of an exhibit.
The museum’s motto is a quote by Abraham Lincoln that begins, “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives,” a stark contrast to the Lyon exhibit. I don’t know what was in the water in New York City in the ’60s, but I don’t want any of it. In addition to the vast swaths of chiefly 19th century buildings leveled below Canal Street, you’ll recall from a recent entry that the elegantly original Penn Station was razed in 1963.
I imagine many of these buildings were beyond repair and had to go. Others, Lyons suggests, were architecturally and historically significant, torn down at a terrible loss. For instance, at 258 Washington St., on the northeast corner of Murray Street, was the first cast-iron building erected in New York (1848) and possibly the oldest cast-iron building in the world. It was demolished.
Lyon risked limb by sneaking into structurally unsound buildings to photograph their interiors, surprised that some still seemed to have people living in them or people who had been recently evicted. His photos document empty Coke bottles in a kitchen, a child’s bedroom containing deflated balloons and an artist’s loft with some sketches strewn on the floor. He photographed the foremen and their crews, too, known as “house wreckers,” looking weary but determined.
The exhibit’s title, which Lyon chose in the ’60s, is the eerily prescient The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, and the exhibit hints at the irony that a grand neighborhood was destroyed to build the Twin Towers. For me, the exhibit illustrated the line between preservation and renewal. The photos, posted mostly without commentary, seem to speak obliquely against renewal. (Lyon is more direct in his convictions, claiming in a recent interview with The Village Voice that the U.S. is committing “architectural suicide” through renewal.) But renewal seems to be an unstoppable fact of New York as a whole and Lower Manhattan in particular. One fact I learned from the exhibit, for example, is that West, Greenwich and Washington Streets are all built on garbage. They became streets when they were surveyed as such in 1723. Prior to that, they were all underwater.