Downtown Manhattan still had a whole lot of these small businesses in these small buildings. And a decision was made that this is no longer the way New York should function. And they literally began to drive as many of those businesses out of Manhattan as possible, hoping they'd go to Long Island City or to one of the outer boroughs. And they inadvertently began to break the back of the work ethic in New York City. I mean, if my father could come with an eighth grade education from Ireland and support a family of seven kids, you know, by working in factories and being a union member and getting as much as he could out of whatever factory he was working at. But he could work. And suddenly in the '60s -- escalating after '62, '63 -- those businesses either went out of business, or they moved to the South first, to avoid unions, and eventually vanished, a lot of them. Beers like Schaeffer and Rheingold and all that, which looked like, you couldn't imagine a world without them, vanished.

And what happened was that you ended up, within ten or 15 years, with the most astonishing welfare population in the history of the world. In 1955, there were 150,000 people on welfare. By the time, by the end of the Lindsay administration, was almost a million. There's nothing like that that had ever happened where one out of eight people lived entirely on the tax money of other people and didn't work, didn't do anything. There were families and kids who never met anybody who ever worked. And that was a huge change, because the thing about being poor in New York growing up was that there was no sin to being poor. There was a sin if you wouldn't work.

And the welfare system, which replaced that work system, and had to, because there was just no jobs, also meshed with the arrival of more people from the South and from the Caribbean who came from agricultural backgrounds and were not trained technicians or mechanics of some kind and had not, very much like my father, had not enormous formal educations. And they got to New York at just the point that the jobs that supported my father began to leave the city. And that was one of the horrors of what happened to the city after this period in which the World Trade Center became the focus of so much energy and money and will. The people building it paid no attention to the consequences of what was happening with the wider idea of what the economy in New York should be like. They thought it would be in trade. They thought it would be in international business. That was the notion of what the port would be, but that trade was no longer shipping bananas to South Street, but some other notion that's more abstract of trade. And I think it really hurt the city that way, because it was, the whole general attitude hurt the city, because it was the consequence of people who didn't know what it meant to have a $75 a week job and to bring home enough food to feed a family. They didn't know that. They had no way of imagining it. They didn't, it's not that they were cruel or anything, they just couldn't imagine their way into those kind of lives. And the casualties were enormous. People really got hurt by that whole period. And this project, in a way, was a symbol of the attitude, in addition to the specific goals.