In an effort to bring residents back to Lower Manhattan the state legislature created Battery Park City in 1968. The first building was completed in 1982 and construction continues today. Earlier this year four sites were under construction and at least three other vacant parcels await development. This 92 acres of landfill - some of it from the excavation of the World Trade Center - currently features the five very large office buildings of the World Financial Center, over 20 residential buildings, and 28 acres of esplanade and pocket parks. Initially development was slow to attract residents. But by the time of the attack more than 10,000 residents were living there.

Recent view of Battery Park City

"Battery Park City is the antithesis of the naturally developing, heterogeneous urban district prescribed by Jane Jacobs (1961), but it incorporates many of her lessons nevertheless. It is dense, has multiple uses, short streets, buildings along the street line, and small accessible parks. Its single management permits the creation of an artificial diversity, with carefully selected tenants and idealized versions of the city of memory (see Boyer, 1983). It lacks the spontaneous contrasts of the real early twentieth-century metropolis, and social commentators fault its exclusionism, contending that even its gorgeous open spaces inhibit public access." - Susan Fainstein, The City Builders, 1994.

Another Recent View of Battery Park City