Downtown Alliance Turns 30

In 1995, a group of enterprising New Yorkers came together to form the Alliance for Downtown New York with a mission to turn things around for the then-struggling financial center. At the time, things in Lower Manhattan were rough. The streets were lined with shuttered and graffiti-covered storefronts, and a residential population of only 14,000 meant the neighborhood felt lifeless and empty once office workers went home. 

But the Alliance’s founders saw Lower Manhattan’s potential, and immediately began the hard work of making the neighborhood shine. The revitalization project included two core Alliance-supplied services: a sanitation team, which cleaned up and maintained the streets, sidewalks and storefronts; and a public safety team, which patrolled the neighborhood to ensure workers, residents and visitors alike stayed safe downtown. The Alliance also sought to reshape the neighborhood from the inside, championing zoning changes, inventive tax incentives for commercial real estate and the creation of new housing, including the then-novel idea of converting outdated and vacant office buildings into housing. The gambit worked, and within just a few years, Lower Manhattan began coming back to life. 

In the last three decades, downtown has transformed from a 9-to-5 business district to a thriving, round-the-clock neighborhood serving tourists, workers and locals alike. We have nearly 70,000 residents, dozens of hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, cocktail bars and dives, sports centers, movie theaters and even a state-of-the-art performance center. No longer solely the city’s financial center, Lower Manhattan is now home to diverse industries including technology, advertising, publishing, marketing and information companies. More than that, the neighborhood is vibrant and wholly alive; the sidewalks are busy, bars and restaurants are packed, hotel rooms are booked and tourists flock to iconic landmarks like the “Charging Bull” and new attractions like PAC NYC. Forever the gateway to the Statue of Liberty, the heart of revolutionary New York and home to the New York Stock Exchange, Lower Manhattan is now also known as a dynamic world-class destination full of entertainment, dining and cultural options to enjoy, whether you live here, work here or are visiting from out of town. 

We’ll toot our own horn here — and track how the Alliance made significant contributions to this metamorphosis over the last 30 years.

To celebrate our big birthday, over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out 30 stories about 30 of our biggest accomplishments, including everything from our daily public safety and sanitation work, to our small business outreach, to how we helped the neighborhood navigate challenges and even tragedies. You’ll be able to find these stories below as they’re published, as well as in our weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. Consider these posts the definitive history of how the Downtown Alliance’s operations, economic development and communications teams have helped shape Lower Manhattan in the last three decades — with even more positive change and transformation to come. We promise.