The present city of New York began in the area of what is now Lower Manhattan. In 1626, Peter Minuit made the deal of the millennium with his purchase of Manhattan from the local Indians for 24 dollars in trinkets. On February 2, 1653 the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in what is now Lower Manhattan became a city with a population of 800. The Dutch city of New Amsterdam became a trading center between Europeans and Indians. On September 8, 1664 an English fleet sent by the Duke Of York seized the city of New Amsterdam. The English changed the name of the city to New York.

Until the explosion of mass transit at the start of the 20th Century, Lower Manhattan was the city’s primary business district. Even after the completion of Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, the classic pre-Depression Lower Manhattan skyline remained the symbol of the city’s economy.

The building of Rockefeller Center and the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in Midtown were pre-World War II indications that midtown was going to compete strongly with Lower Manhattan as a business district, but the Depression and World War II permitted Lower Manhattan’s Financial District to continue to reign supreme.

The migration to the suburbs, helped tremendously by the federal highway program, changed things dramatically within a few years after World War II as executives opted for midtown locations to shorten their suburban commutes. In response to the construction boom in midtown, Lower Manhattan responded with One Chase Manhattan Plaza, a modern tower that clashed mightily with its Art Deco skyscraper neighbors but was a major financial committee that would be followed in a few years by the decision to build the World Trade Center. Excavations from the World Trade Center site enabled the construction of new landfill to the west that would in time become Battery Park City.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center dramatically altered the city’s skyline but they did lead to the creation of the 92-acre Battery Park City complex of housing and offices that began to make Lower Manhattan more of a 24-hour community, one significantly enhanced by the great Wintergarden complex at the World Financial Center at Battery Park City and by Battery Park City’s splendid riverfront esplanade and its high, albeit conservative, design standards for new residential construction.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 demolished the twin towers of the World Trade Center and cast a pall over Lower Manhattan, one, however, that was surprisingly short-lived because of the city and the federal government’s resolve to rebuild. Despite prolonged controversies over the design of a rebuilt Ground Zero, Lower Manhattan began to pulse with new activity as many major old office buildings were converted to apartments and as TriBeCa boomed with dozens of very attractive small projects, many of which indicated that a new design sensitivity was in the air.

Lower Manhattan consists of several different neighborhoods but the most spectacular is the Financial District, whose mighty cliffs and canyons resonate with great architectural and capitalist glories.

The skyline was dominated for decades by the brownstone spire of the Trinity Episcopal Church at the foot of Wall Street along Broadway, flanked by its large cemetery that now serves as one of the world’s finest urban parks framed by the very attractive facades at the north and south of older office buildings.

Shortly after the start of the 20th Century, the city’s modern skyline began to emerge here, dominated by the great Singer Building, designed by Ernest Flagg, and the even greater Woolworth Building, a few blocks to the north on Broadway, designed by Cass Gilbert. Unfortunately, the former tower was demolished in the 1960’s to make way for One Liberty Plaza, a dark and somber steel skyscraper. The Woolworth Company closed its famous stores in the late 1990’s and sold its great Gothic-style tower, widely known as the "Cathedral of Commerce", in June, 1998 for $155 million to the Witkoff Group. Interestingly, many dentists for many years occupied offices near the top gargoyles of this great tower, considered by some architects as their favorite in the city. The Witkoff Group intends to convert the upper floors of the Woolworth Building, which is enjoying its post-9/11 visibility, to apartments.

The continuing controversies and delays over Ground Zero’s redevelopment might have severely dampened Lower Manhattan’s renaissance. The heightened sensitivity to architectural design in the wake of those controversies led to a great deal of enthusiasm for two major new skyscrapers proposed for the Financial District, one just to the south of the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge and one block to the east of City Hall Park, and the other, close to the South Street Seaport and the East River. The former was a mixed-use tower proposed by Forest City Rattner and the latter was a stack of 10 four-story townhouses proposed by Frank Sciame. Frank O. Gehry and Santiago Calatrava, the world’s two most famous and influential architects, were the architects of the projects, respectively.

Gehry’s new Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain was the most admired building of the late 20th Century and Forest City Rattner commissioned him not only for the site near City Hall but also for a much larger complex known as Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, Barry Diller commissioned a much smaller project from Gehry, a new headquarters on West Street in Chelsea as a mid-rise headquarters for his firm and as it took shape in 2006 it was clearly another Gehry masterpiece in which he shaped glass facades to look like sails.

When Gehry’s design for Rattner’s Lower Manhattan site was finally shown in 2006, it was a glistening, stepped tower clad in titanium that promised to be as sparkling as the stainless steel crown of the Chrysler Building in midtown. Unlike his mid-rise project for Diller, Gehry’s design for the Rattner site on Beekman and Spruce Streets was going to a very tall and very visible structure of about 75 stories.

Reaction to it was not quite as universally positive as it was for the design, shown much earlier, for Calatrava’s skyscraper at 80 South Street for Mr. Sciame. Almost as tall as Gehry’s skyscraper, Calatrava’s tower consistent of 10 four-story townhouses stacked atop one-another separated by space for roof gardens and terraces for each townhouse unit, all atop a boxy base for a cultural or community facility.

Both projects promised to overshadow, in principle not literally, the watered-down, constantly revised proposed towers to replace the World Trade Center, not because they would be taller but because they were more spectacular. There was a general sense that the design fiascoes at Ground Zero were being offset by the promise of major new skyscrapers by the foremost architects in the world. The good news is that the Gehry/Rattner project finally appears to be moving ahead. The bad news is that the Calatrava/Sciame project has yet to start.

Calatrava, meanwhile, designed a major new transportation hub center for Ground Zero and major improvements were planned for a Fulton Street Transit Center to be designed by Nicholas Grimshaw.

Most architectural aficionados strongly hope that Calatrava’s 80 South Street tower gets built, many noting that the east side of Lower Manhattan especially on Water Street developed a very distinctive and interesting character in the 1970s when the William Kaufman Organization, led by Robert Kaufman, built two very unusual office buildings. One at 77 Water Street had a full-size sculpture of a Sopwith Camel World War I fighter plane on its roof for the visual pleasure of its neighbors in taller buildings while its ground floor spaces included a wooden general store with a "soft" plastic soda machine. The other at 127 Water Street had a forest of entrance canopies and its main entrance was through a large corrugated steel, neon-lit tunnel.

Kaufman’s philosophy was that buildings should not ignore humans and be good-natured. Urban design, he believed, was more important than architecture. Both office buildings, however, had clean modern lines. Eventually, 127 John Street would be converted to apartments and Mr. Kaufman would decide that Lower Manhattan could use some new, good architecture and he built 17 State Street, the curved reflective-glass tower overlooking Battery Park. With its circular, glass-enclosed lobby with a cobblestone floor, Kaufman’s new tower was an architectural masterpiece and one of New York City’s few modern icons.

These buildings, of course, did not significantly changing the skyline. After the Chase Building, the really big change was the World Trade Center, which was completed in the early 1970’s, flooding the market with 10 million square feet of office space and tilting the balance of the skyline to the west.

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the twin towers were structurally impressive as the outer stainless steel walls carried much of the buildings’ weight and eliminating the need for most interior columns. The towers also used "sky-lobbies" to improve elevator efficiency. The wind-blown plaza was best used for a huge mock-up of King Kong in the first remake of the famous movie and the center probably achieved its greatest fame prior to the terrorist bombing in one of the towers in the 1990’s when a tightrope artist, Philippe Petite, walked between them at the top. Although there was a famous restaurant, Windows on the World, at the top of one of the towers and an observatory, views from the offices were rather frustrating because the protruding steel mullions were very close to one another, limiting unobstructed panoramic vistas.

The center’s concourse, on the other hand, was enormous, but unfortunately had relatively low ceilings. The very broad bank of escalators descending to the PATH subway line, which goes to New Jersey and midtown, was used in such movies as "Koyanasqatsi" to great visual effect.

If the center was completely out of scale with the rest of Lower Manhattan, it nevertheless was very bold and modern and seen at sunset from New Jersey was electrifying reflective.

Almost two decades later, the imbalance it created on the skyline would be significantly ameliorated by the completion of Olympia & York’s World Financial Center, designed by Cesar Pelli, at Battery Park City just across a skywalk over West Street from the plaza level of the World Trade Center. That skywalk led directly to the other project’s fabulous Wintergarden, perhaps the most dramatic interior space in the city, and its quite elegant retail concourses. The two retail centers did much to improve downtown’s shopping experience, as did J. & R., the company that has a block-long-row of electronics and consumer technology stores along Park Row, whose buildings used to house many of the city’s major newspapers, south of City Hall.

The astounding collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have been indelibly seared into the collective memory of New Yorkers, who have since proved themselves to be very resilient.

The South Street Seaport, just south of the Fulton Fish Market and the Brooklyn Bridge along the East River, has a good variety of stores and restaurants, many in very old landmark buildings along "Schermerhorn Row" on Fulton Street and others in newer, but "contextual" buildings. This major and pleasant tourist attraction has a few old ships that can be visited, but it could use more. It often has concerts and boat rides in the harbor are available, though a bit more costly than the still very, very reasonable Staten Island Ferry at the west end of Battery Park.

The Seaport has had mixed success in large part because the winter season is hard on the retailers who also compete with the popular Nassau Street mall a few blocks away. A jitney service was finally started in the late 1990’s to connect it with the Battery Park City and Battery Park, a long overdue scheme to make Lower Manhattan more accessible.

With its history and great architecture and its two riverfronts, Lower Manhattan is the city’s greatest urban environment even though it needs, and is getting, more residents, more cafés, more hotels and more special events.

Apart from Operation Sail celebrating the nation’s Bicentennial when the "tall ships" sailed up the harbor, one of the great events of the last quarter century downtown was a twilight concert given by Tomita, the synthesizer performer, who played suspended in mid-air in a glass pyramid just off Battery Park, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, as laser beams criss-crossed the harbor and a sailboat passed with a violinist at the prow and a Staten Island Ferry pulled up with a full chorus on its top deck.

It was enthralling, a rapturous evening, and every night should be as spectacular in such a setting. Every day already is.

The opening night gala at the Wintergarden at Battery Park City was an impressive evening, but catching a cab afterward was no fun and still can be a daunting wait.

In the mid-1990’s, many owners of older commercial properties were experiencing high vacancy rates in their properties and the city’s economy was at a very low point with the real estate market still reeling from the 1987 stock market crash.

Major older properties could be had for a proverbial song. Donald Trump, for example, picked up 40 Wall Street, one of the skyline’s anchors, for just a few million dollars. The office market turned around, quite suddenly and strongly, however, by the late 1990’s and some planned conversions were reconsidered as the impressive number of conversions had contributed to a significant lowering of the area’s vacancy rate.

The changed economy, now very upbeat, meanwhile, led to the reopening of the famed Delmonico’s restaurant and, perhaps more impressively, to the announcement that Cipriani’s would open a major luxury restaurant in the awesome former banking hall at 55 Wall Street, one of the area’s major landmarks. In 2005, plans were announced to convert 55 Wall Street to Cipriani Residences. At one point, it seemed that all of the Financial District’s great older office buildings might be converted to apartment buildings, but in 2006 the owner of the former Bankers Trust Building at 14 Wall Street decided against a residential conversion, a reflection of the tremendous new inventory of converted properties and steeply rising office rents.

The New York Stock Exchange proposed and then abandoned an ungainly and not very sensitive plan to bridge over Broad Street in its search for expansion space. One of the largest residential conversions was just down the street from the famous exchange’s very impressive entrance. The rent levels and sales prices of the new housing units are quite high by any standard and these projects have been quite successful in filling up.

The threshold has been crossed. Lower Manhattan is well on its way to becoming a fascinating mixed-use community. The pioneers, who suffered without a fully complement of amenities, are being vindicated and the newcomers are excited about the area’s potential with reasonable justification. There are still pockets of older, small properties that can be upgraded and there is certainly a need for more movie theaters and restaurants and a supermarket or two, but it is unlikely that the trend will be reversed.

Indeed, the popularity of SoHo and the Flatiron District initiated a significant change in the city’s cultural mores in the last decade or so of the millennium, one that has refocused attention on the great assets and merits of the southern half of Manhattan and downtown is the most spectacular environment.

North of the Wall Street and South Street Seaport areas are City Hall and the civic center and the courts around Foley Square, Chinatown and Little Italy - all within walking distance of the Financial District as is the great esplanade at Battery Park City and the major retail facilities at the World Financial Center and the many good restaurants of TriBeCa to the west.

Central Park and East River vistas are nice, but Lower Manhattan’s are special.