Many people who visit New York City for the first time have often told me it feels like being in a movie, with its streets and sights feeling familiar from countless films and television series. But to me, the Big Apple is more than familiar—it’s my home—having grown up in the city across three boroughs, including the Lower Manhattan area, where I spent my high school years at Stuyvesant High School until 2000, the year before the September 11 terror attacks. Much like everyone else in the world, I remember exactly where I was when I first received the news about the 9/11 attacks.
I was at a morning philosophy lecture at Binghamton University in upstate New York when our professor immediately dismissed us all before the class had begun in view of the event, after which I was frantically trying to get a hold of my family back in New York City. Located just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, I later learned that Stuyvesant High School was used as an emergency triage center just after 9/11 to facilitate medical services, and its students were temporarily taught in other buildings before it reopened as a school. Visiting Stuyvesant and the surrounding area just a couple of weeks before the anniversary of 9/11 felt very surreal, knowing the floors, hallways, and classrooms I’d roamed around for four years would have been filled with medical personnel and patients in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
It had been at least a decade or so since I last visited, and the shiny, metal doors of my school and the vast green space of Battery Park City that we had on our doorstep felt the same, or even more beautiful and serene than I’d remembered. It was comforting to see a few vestiges remaining from my school years, including the New Amsterdam Library on Murray Street, local primary and secondary schools, and even the McDonald's on Chambers Street, and the Century 21 department store, not far from the World Trade Center site. But I was most struck by how the feel of my old stomping grounds had changed since the days I used to hop off the 2 or 3 trains at Chambers Street every morning and join a swarm of other sleepy-eyed students walking towards Stuyvesant.
Lower Manhattan’s Financial District was mostly known for office workers, especially being home to Wall Street. The district felt busy with commuters and workers by day but dead quiet by night after the bankers and other workers had emptied the area. The area became an eerie ghost town for several years after 9/11, following the exodus of companies that had left the area because of the toxic air and never returned, notes Dana Tamuccio, a native New Yorker who is a Lower Manhattan historian and the founder of Vibe NYC Tours.
The area has a deeply personal connection for Tamuccio, having lost her oldest sibling, who worked in the north tower, in the 9/11 attacks. Her father was also a New York Stock Exchange floor broker for 43 years, so she spent a significant part of her youth in and around the area. She tells me that residential development became essential to the recovery of Lower Manhattan.
Recent years have seen various office-to-residential conversions, such as 55 Broad Street and 25 Water Street, which have played a major role in the transformation of the Financial District, according to Teresa Stephenson, president of Platinum Forbes Global Properties, a real estate brokerage firm that’s been based in the district for over 20 years. New luxury towers have also been built, such as The Greenwich, which is said to be one of the only “true ground-up developments” in the area, says Gregory Davis, director at Fortress Investment Group. The 88-story residential tower is one of the last works by the renowned late architect Rafael Viñoly.
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