port authority trans-hudson

Though entertained throughout the 1940s and 1950s as a vehicle for urban renewal and to stimulate development, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller felt he had not gathered the sufficient and sustaining political and public will to sign the bill directing the construction of a World Trade Centre for Manhattan until this day in 1961 and fraught with zoning and controversy, not completed until twelve years later—almost to the day. The project, intended to rehabilitate the Port Authority where ridership was declining, displaced New York City’s Radio Row, a warehouse district that had existed since the 1920s which hosted many electronics goods stores and was a driver of innovation by proximity and saturation as well as affecting many tenants and small businesses in the dense waterfront neighbourhood. Many of the affected protested that the city should have gotten involved in a prestige project masquerading as social stimulus.