In the sixties, when sixty acres below Canal Street were slated for clearing, Danny Lyon documented disappearing traces of life dating back to before the Civil War.
In 1966, after several years spent rambling around the country photographing a Chicago-based motorcycle club, Danny Lyon returned to his native New York City. Lyon had previously worked as the staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and when he moved into a downtown apartment on Beekman Street, at the age of twenty-five, he was already well on the way to making a name for himself. Beekman was dotted with boarded-up buildings. Lyon learned that the block was among the sixty acres below Canal Street slated for clearing, areas that had once been a hub of thriving printing and produce industries but had bled out economically after the Second World War. As Elisabeth Sussman notes in the catalogue for “Message to the Future,” a recent retrospective of Lyon’s work at the Whitney, powerful developers, like David Rockefeller and Robert Moses, saw potential profit in remaking these spaces. But when Lyon looked at them he saw “fossils,” traces of life dating back to before the Civil War. So, with funding from the The New York State Council on the Arts, he set out with a view camera, slipping in and out of demolition sites from the East River to the Hudson. In a project he titled “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan,” he photographed the folks leaving buildings and those tearing them down, and, in so doing, documented the social dismantling that buzzes under every project billed as urban renewal.
