How, after 9/11, New York built back better

THE MORNING after the September 11th attacks, as exhausted first-responders looked for survivors in rubble still wreathed in smoke, New Yorkers braced themselves for more attacks. The final death toll came to 2,743 people, almost all New Yorkers. America would later launch two long, costly wars in response and squander its moral authority in prisons in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In some ways the country is worse off now than it was on September 10th 2001, more anxious, more polarised, less trusting. New York City, though, is better. The resurrection of Lower Manhattan acted as a catalyst for rebuilding and rethinking well beyond the area destroyed on that terrible day.

The smoke, ashes and dust radiated outwards from the site of the attack. But so, more gradually, did the construction boom, which spread from Tribeca, up to Chelsea and eventually across the five boroughs to long-neglected neighbourhoods like Jamaica and Flushing in Queens, to Staten Island’s St George and along Brooklyn’s waterfront. New York City ended up “greater than ever”, says Dan Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor. Few would have predicted this outcome while a 16-acre pit burned for months. But for New Yorkers staggered by the shock of 9/11, rebuilding became a rallying cause, a way of not letting the terrorists win.

What followed was the reimagination of Lower Manhattan, one of America’s biggest business districts. Before, just 23,000 people lived in the area. It emptied out each evening, as office workers, who mainly worked in finance, insurance or property, went home. The World Trade Centre, now remembered with wistfulness, was not loved when it still stood. The complex around it blocked streets, cutting off the surrounding neighbourhood. Its underground shopping centre, popular with commuters, siphoned punters from street stores. “It was very rare to see anybody walking a dog and pushing a baby carriage,” recalls Robert McKay, a lawyer who worked in the area.

Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire media mogul, then a Republican, was elected mayor two months after the attacks and partly because of them: Republicans tend to win mayoral elections only when the habitually Democratic city is in crisis. He called on businesses to do their part by staying. “This is no time to leave the Big Apple,” he said in his inaugural speech. Some moved to nearby midtown, including Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 people—every employee at their desk on the 101st to 105th floors of the North Tower. Its new office was no higher than the fire department’s highest ladder. Only a few businesses left the city altogether. Some only threatened to go, among them the New York Stock Exchange.

It became an act not just of patriotism, but of self-interest, to operate downtown. As it turned out, the timing was fortuitous. Other American cities would revive their urban cores in the next 20 years as well. Yet that was not knowable at the time. Many companies that stayed in Manhattan availed themselves of new financial incentives. The federal government authorised $8bn in Liberty Bonds, a sort of tax-exempt financing. It also gave New York a $20.5bn aid package. George Pataki, the governor, appointed John Whitehead, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, to lead the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which was charged with guiding the revival of the area, including the rebuilding on the World Trade Centre site. At times, the task seemed hopeless. Almost everyone agreed that the area needed to be rebuilt, but they also seemed to have different ideas of what should be built where, by whom and with whose money.

Disagreements among insurance companies, developers and politicians delayed the project for years. The reconstruction had to navigate round a dozen subway lines and a New Jersey commuter line, as well as the feelings of victims’ families. But in 2006 the first office building, 7 World Trade Centre, was finished, along with an electricity substation in its lower floors. The memorial opened in 2011, and One World Trade Centre—built to the patriotic height of 1,776 feet—was finished in 2014. The Oculus, a gravity-defying train terminal and shopping centre, was completed in 2016. Two more skyscrapers and a performing arts centre are in the works. A Greek Orthodox church, which was also destroyed that day, will reopen next year.

The years after 9/11 proved to be an era of municipal ambition the like of which New York had not experienced in two generations. The subway was expanded for the first time in decades. Other projects, such as the High Line (an obsolete freight track converted to public space) and Hudson Yards (a massive redevelopment project on Manhattan’s West Side) might well not have happened without the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. To stimulate development, Mr Bloomberg re-zoned 40% of the city, something which would have been harder if not impossible without the crisis and subsequent sense of solidarity. Encouragement to other industries, such as tech and biotech, further diversified and boosted the city’s economy.

Lower Manhattan is now less dominated by finance. Before 9/11 financial services and property accounted for 60% of private-sector employment. Its share was down to one-third before covid-19 scrambled the data. “A different type of worker is there, and certainly is not running off to the suburbs at 4.30pm,” says Jessica Lappin, head of the Downtown Alliance, which advocates for the district.

And not only business moved in. The residential population of Lower Manhattan more than doubled between 2001 and 2020, as did the number of residential units. Some new residents were enticed to the area with months of free rent, but the district quickly became fashionable. Many of the old office buildings have been converted to condominiums. Children, rarely glimpsed below Canal Street in 2001, now make up 17% of the population. New schools were built to accommodate the new families. Tourists came too. Before 2001, only six hotels served the district. At least until covid-19 arrived, 37 hotels operated in the area.

Perhaps none of this would have happened if the feeling of safety, which disappeared so swiftly on 9/11, had not returned. The NYPD, which added 1,000 officers to its counter-terrorism division and worked closely with the FBI and the CIA to develop new capabilities, must take some credit for this. When London and Madrid suffered terrorism attacks, NYPD officers were soon on the scene. The department now has intelligence officers in 18 other cities. Ray Kelly, who was Mr Bloomberg’s police commissioner for 12 years, reckons the NYPD thwarted 16 attacks on his watch. Crime also declined, though the causes of that improvement are disputed.

For the past 18 months, as covid-19 has spread through the city, politicians and pundits have all said versions of: “We got through 9/11. We’ll get through the pandemic.” It would be unwise to dismiss that as mere New York bluster, given how unexpected the city’s revival looked when Lower Manhattan was coated in ash. Yet there are more dismal precedents to consider too. New York took far longer—25 years—to recover from the white flight and manufacturing decline of the 1970s. Then, 1.3m people and dozens of Fortune 500 companies left the city. “The question is,” says Mr Doctoroff, “is it going to be like 9/11, or is it going to be like the 1970s?” ■