Radio Row actually was a constellation of wholesale and retail outlets, this time for what are radio goods, in the 1920s, vacuum tubes and what not. This is the kind of place where both businesses and, you know, ham operators and all that sort of flocked to buy things. It was a thriving marketplace in electronic goods.

And after the Second World War it expands. You've got an enormous amount of army surplus, navy surplus stuff that's being sold, latest in electronic gadgetry. Who knows, you know. But it's the kind of place that's a petri dish for the potential development of an electronics institute. We talk about the electronics on the West coast growing out of garages and what not. Well, this is, this is the operation that caters to that. And in fact, very soon... electronics, one of the giants of the later industry, is going to grow out of that petri dish down there in Radio Row. You move up a little bit, still on the Hudson River side, you've got the printing trades, which are servicing the financial district. You've still got a hefty garment manufacturing component. You swing around a little bit. You're into Chinatown. Chinatown is, again, pretty sleepy, because immigration restriction had cut off the influx of Chinese, so the community's kind of an aging bachelor society. But if you shift over to the East River, you've still got the Fulton Fish Market, you know, functional, viable, some of the new public housing which is going in, in just the late Forties, which is housing some of the new immigrants coming up from Puerto Rico and elsewhere.

So there's an amazing diversity of things around what is the old financial core, which is really only one section of this operation. And it, in fact, is very kind of back water status. Remember, it had been at its height in the 1910s and the 1920s explosions, when the great towers built up. And they had grand visions of expanding throughout the rest of the area. But the Depression laid them low. War time, not much happening. There's no new construction had gone on, no big new office buildings. More to the point, the industry itself was very cautious. The corporate economy was still sort of slow. There was concerns about the return of a recession at the end of the war. The great push abroad hadn't really taken off yet. The stock market is sort of dozing along. So it's this kind of equilibrium between a variety of uses that looks very much like it might have looked 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.