In 1966, Danny Lyon, then 23, returned to his native New York City an emerging star on the photography scene. He spent the first half of the decade documenting the Civil Rights Movement as the official photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; at the same time he was a member of the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club, making what would become The Bikeriders (1968), a landmark monograph that exemplified the emerging school of New Journalism.
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Lyon moved to Lower Manhattan just as the neighborhood was about to be torn apart to make way for the construction of the World Trade Center, under the auspices of David Rockefeller, founder of the Downtown Manhattan Association and brother of then-governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefellers decided to launch of a program of “urban renewal,” which wholesale erased a neighborhood dating back over a century. Recognizing this historic moment, Lyon set to work, creating the portrait of a world that would soon disappear in the landmark 1969 book, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, just reissued by Aperture.
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“I came to see the buildings as fossils of a time past,” Lyon wrote in the book’s introduction. “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. Skyscrapers emerged from the rock of Manhattan like mountains growing out from the earth. And here and there near their base, caught between them on their old narrow streets, were the houses of the dead, the new buildings of their own time awaiting demolition.”
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