About the Book:
In 1967, Danny Lyon returned to New York City, having just finished The Bikeriders (Macmillan, 1968). He was twenty-five. Living in a loft on the corner of Beekman and Williams Streets, Lyon saw that half the buildings on Beekman Street were boarded up, about to be demolished. Incredibly, that year sixty acres of mostly nineteenth century buildings were slated for demolition, all below Chambers Street. The seven-acre site where the Twin Towers would eventually stand was being cleared, a new ramp added to the Brooklyn Bridge, Pace University expanded, and the Washington Market was being moved to the Bronx. Much of the West Side was being turned into rubble. Lyon thought of the title The Destruction of Lower Manhattan first, and then made a record of each building before it was demolished. The book was released by Macmillan Publishers in 1969, and remaindered a few years later; the copies sold for one dollar each. It has been a collector’s item ever since.
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Thirty-eight years after these photographs were made, powerHouse Books republished The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. Because of the disaster that would strike the city a generation later, New Yorkers have taken on a renewed and fervent interest in the architecture of their city. This work is a major contribution to that new world. For Lyon, these buildings in their last days standing were the embodiment of a beauty and pathos that people walking by in the street seldom noticed at the time. Those feelings were preserved in the photographs that today survive exactly as the young author intended, as a memory and a record of what was.
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About the Author:
Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn and educated in the New York City public school system. While studying history at the University of Chicago, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as their first staff photographer. Today, the pictures he made from 1962 to 1964 comprise the largest personal photographic record made of the southern civil rights movement. He returned to Chicago to make The Bikeriders (Macmillan, 1968). This book helped create what is now called “the new journalism.”
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Lyon went on to a distinguished career in photojournalism, producing ten books of photography, and an equal number of nonfiction films. His books include, Indian Nations (Twin Palms, 2002), Knave of Hearts (Twin Palms, 1999), a memoir, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina, 1992), Merci Gonaives (Bleak Beauty, 1988), an account of the 1986 Haitian revolution, and Conversations with the Dead (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), the first book by a photojournalist inside the American Prison system. He has received a Rockefeller Fellowship in filmmaking, Guggenheim Fellowships for photography and filmmaking, and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts.
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Vintage and modern prints of his photographs are among the most highly prized of a working photographer. His photographs are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; as well as other museums throughout the world. Lyon is represented by the Edwynn Houk Gallery, and expresses his views on the media on his website, www.bleakbeauty.com. He lives on farms in Ulster County, New York and Sandoval County, New Mexico.
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Miss Rosen’s Contribution:
Miss Rosen handled the international publicity campaign for The Destruction of Lower Manhattan.
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Coordinated international publicity campaign including coverage in
Associated Press, The Architect’s Newspaper, B&W, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
Downtown Express, New York Sun, New York Times Arts & Leisure, New York Times City Section, Newark Star Ledger,
The New Yorker, Photograph, Publisher’s Weekly, San Jose Mercury News, The Speakeasy/WFMU, Village Voice, and Villager, among others.
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ARCHITECTURE | NYC | PHOTOGRAPHY
Clothbound, 9.5 x 10.75 inches, 160 pages,
83 tritone photographs, ISBN: 1-57687-232-7, $50.00
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Photographs ©Danny Lyon
Cover courtesy of powerHouse Books