About a third of Colonial New York was devastated from Whitehall Street to beyond St. Paul's Chapel west of Broadway. Townhouses would even be built on landfill beyond the original shoreline of Greenwich Street. View three of them including one converted into a Syrian Church. By the middle of the Nineteenth Century tenements and industrial buildings would transform this former wealthy neighborhood as it became home to many diverse immigrant groups.
See the Downtown Community House with its 100 years of community service. Fifteen nationalities were counted at its opening in 1926.
Starting in the 1940s two acts of eminent domain to build the Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center would destroy the unique vibrant neighborhood. Celebrate 250 years of Manhattan's Lower West Side history with Joe Svehlak whose family lived here over a century ago.
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