Maps: Layers of Lower Manhattan (text-only)

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1990s: Global Financial Hub

New York City expanded into the twentieth century, its five boroughs linked by tunnels and bridges, as well as a top-notch subway system. Business and industry steadily moved out of Lower Manhattan to Midtown -- and beyond.

By the 1960s, shippers were transporting cargo in gigantic containers, making Manhattan's narrow piers unusable, and the commercial port moved across the Hudson River to cheaper, more spacious quarters in northern New Jersey. By the end of World War II, the once thriving tip of Manhattan was a ghost of its former self.

Lower Manhattan began a slow revival starting in 1961, when David Rockefeller built his sixty-story Chase Manhattan Plaza -- the first new skyscraper in the area since before the Depression. Rockefeller championed the massive World Trade Center as part of a dramatic urban renewal plan. Beginning in the 1980s, the New York Stock Exchange invested a billion dollars in technology to position Wall Street at the center of global investing. The Port Authority continued the area's long tradition of geographical redefinition with landfill and pier removal projects.

1. World Trade Center
The World Trade Center brought about ten million square feet of new office space to Lower Manhattan and transformed the skyline. When the 110-story towers opened, they were the highest buildings in the world. More than a million cubic yards of earth removed for the foundation were trucked a short distance and used as landfill for Battery Park City.

2. Battery Park City
Apart from artists who moved into large vacated warehouses along the waterfront, relatively few people lived in Lower Manhattan after World War II. Part of the 1960s urban renewal plan was to fill in the water surrounding Battery Island to establish the 92-acre Battery Park City -- and extend the commercial and residential capacity of Manhattan. New residents and businesses moved there throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

3. City Hall Subway Station
The New York City Subway system, introduced in 1904, was an immediate competitor to the loud, unsightly elevated train. The Subway's City Hall Station was the southern terminus for the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway and a showcase for the new system. The original eastern line traveled north to Grand Central Station and was eventually extended from City Hall south and east across the river towards Brooklyn.

4. Wall Street/ New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange opened in its present Wall Street location in 1903, beginning a shift in the region's economic identity from commerce to finance. The 1929 market crash and the Great Depression damaged public confidence in Wall Street. The government formed the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 and after World War II the stock exchange began to attract small investors. In 1981 the N.Y.S.E. switched from a paper-based system to a computerized one, enabling greater and quicker transactions.

5. West Side Highway/ Brooklyn Battery Tunnel
Robert Moses, New York City's controversial master planner, designed the region's highways and tunnels to benefit car traffic, sometimes at the expense of historic buildings and neighborhoods. The West Side Highway runs along the western side of Manhattan; FDR Drive is its East Side counterpart. Moses's plan to connect Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan with a massive suspension bridge was thwarted in 1939. In its place, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened in 1950.