The Destruction Of Lower Manhattan

In 1967, Danny Lyon returned to New York having just completed The Bikeriders. While living in a loft, Lyon saw that half of 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. 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. Much of the Lower West Side was being turned into rubble. Since being remaindered after its original release in 1969, it has become a treasured collector's item. Now thirty-eight years after these photographs were made, it is once again widely available and is one of a very few number of records that document these lost buildings. Because of the disaster that would strike the city as generation later, New Yorkers and the world have taken a renewed interest in the architecture of this fantastic city.

About the Author :
Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn. While studying history at the University of Chicago, Lyon joined the "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee" as their first staff photographer. One of the best-known photojournalists today, Lyon has produced ten books of photography and an equal number of nonfiction films. His books include, "Indian Nations" (Twin Palms, 2002), "Knave of Hearts" (Twin Palms, 1999), a memoir, "Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement" (University of North Carolina, 1992), "Merci Gonaives" (Bleak Beauty, 1988), an account of the 1986 Haitian revolution, and "Conversations with the Dead" (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), the first book by a photojournalist inside the American prison system. He has received a Rockefeller Fellowship in filmmaking, Guggenheim Fellowships for photography and filmmaking, and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His photographs are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Corcoran Gallery of Art and The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; as well as other museums throughout the world. Lyon farms in Ulster County, New York and Sandoval County, New Mexico.

Review :
"I came to see the buildings as fossils of a timed past...the passing of buildings was for me a great event...the streets involved were among the oldest in New York and when sections of some were closed by the barriers of demolition men, it meant they would never be opened again." - Danny Lyon"