The Destruction of Lower Manhattan
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Book Summary Information
Photographer: Danny LyonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-05-01
ISBN: 1576872327
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Book Reviews of The Destruction of Lower Manhattan
Book Review: Doing what Great Photographs have always done
Summary: 5 Stars
These photographs were originally published in 1967 and at the time, they represented the norm for solid earnest photography. that is, the technique and understated design stood in service of the images. By the way, I've seen the actual photographs. The Museum of the City of New York just opened a show of these same images. So one reacts not to the photo but to the subject: these now long gone buildings, and the even older signs of a long past life (for example a calendar from 1951 on the wall of one of the shabby lofts).
This work stands in sharp contrast to the current trend in photography .... a typical current show will feature large scale images, usually in color, always over printed. I will be standing in front of a life sized and unflattering portrait of a person - and wonder why the image was selected. After noting the skin texture (always more present than in life) I walk away with... nothing. Not so with these. I first saw this book in 1970 when in a sculpture class in Cooper Union. Although I had not seen the book in at least 25 years, I never forgot them.
Buy the book - it will be one book you will look at for sure 25 years hence.
Summary of The Destruction of Lower Manhattan
?I came to see the buildings as fossils of a time past. These buildings were used during the Civil War. The men were all dead, but the buildings were still here, left behind as the city grew around them....The passing of buildings was for me a great event. It didn?t matter so much whether they were of architectural importance. What mattered to me was that they were about to be destroyed. Whole blocks would disappear. An entire neighborhood. Its few last loft occupying tenants were being evicted, and no place like it would ever be built again. The streets involved were among the oldest in New York and when sections of some were closed by the barriers of the demolition men, it meant they would never be opened again.??Danny Lyon
In late 1966, Danny Lyon returned to New York City, having just finished The Bikeriders. He was twenty-five. Living in a loft on the corner of Beekman and William Streets in Downtown Manhattan, Lyon saw that half the buildings on Beekman Street were boarded up, about to be demolished. That year an incredible sixty acres of mostly nineteenth-century buildings were slated for demolition, all below Canal Street. The seven-acre site where the Twin Towers would eventually stand was being cleared, a new ramp added to the Brooklyn Bridge, Pace University expanded, and the Washington Market was being moved to the Bronx. Whole sections of Lower Manhattan were being turned into rubble.
Lyon thought of the title The Destruction of Lower Manhattan first, and then made a record of each building before it was demolished. The book was released by Macmillan Publishers in 1969, and remaindered a few years later; the copies sold for one dollar each. It has been a collector?s item ever since.
Thirty-eight years after these photographs were made, many of them are the only record that survives of entire blocks that once lined Fulton Street, and West Street along the Hudson. Because of the disaster that would strike the city a generation later, New Yorkers have taken on a renewed and fervent interest in the architecture of their city. This work is a major contribution to that new world. For Lyon, these buildings in their last days standing were the embodiment of a beauty and pathos that people walking by in the street seldom noticed at the time. Those feelings were preserved in the photographs that today survive exactly as the young author intended, as a memory and a record of what was.
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