The Museum's October 2017 through June 2018 exhibition MILLENNIUM: Lower Manhattan in the 1990s was documented in an online version that was hard-coded and buggy. All the content of that site is transferred here on a new platform, but without changing tenses from present to past.
The last decade of the 20th century in New York City was not a simple time. The end of a millennium – a thousand-year marker – and the beginning of the 2000s prompted both anxiety and optimism, posing questions about what to retain from the past and how to move into the future.
No place in the mid-1990s was more conflicted about these prospects or more ripe for reinvention than lower Manhattan – especially the historic Financial District. Wall Street was losing banks to mergers and relocations. Grand skyscrapers of the 1910s and ‘20s were becoming technologically obsolete and sliding down-market. The lasting effect of the 1987 stock market crash, followed by the savings-and-loan scandals, caused a real estate recession that hit Downtown harder than other districts. Vacancy rates for office buildings topped
28 percent. New thinking and policies were necessary.
Preservation and reinvention were twin themes of the Downtown discussion. Landmarking and converting older office buildings to residential and other uses were strategies of economic development. Celebrating the district’s rich history and creating a culture for tourism was another initiative, led by Heritage Trails New York. Twenty years ago, the nascent Skyscraper Museum used the real estate recession to find free space for its first pop-up exhibitions in grand vacant banking halls at 44 Wall Street and 14 Wall. MILLENNIUM revisits this recent history of lower Manhattan in the years just before Downtown’s identity was cataclysmically recast as Ground Zero, and a new era truly began.
The only remaining original Heritage Trails marker is on permanent display in the National September 11 Museum. The panel was originally located in Tobin Plaza at the of the Twin Towers and salvaged after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
MIXED MESSAGES OF THE MILLENNIUM
Installation view.
Some historical divisions are artificial and conventional, such as decades and centuries, and some are meaningful and definitive, like prewar and postwar. The countdown to New Year’s Eve 2000, of course, attracted worldwide media attention, ranging from reporting on real fears of a “Y2K” computer apocalypse to futuristic musings from profound to funny, as this sampling of newspapers and magazines suggest.
No one knew then that the defining year of change would begin on September 11, 2001.