Lower Manhattan Offers Clues on How to Live Post-Pandemic

As New York City looks to reinvent itself for the post-pandemic era, lower Manhattan offers a few lessons on how to recover from disaster. Once largely a 9-to-5 financial center, the district has changed since the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks into a walkable neighborhood that has more than doubled its residential population. Officials’ determination to transform the area made it more resilient to the sort of economic shocks the entire city now faces: widespread job losses and the threat of people leaving because they don’t feel safe (back then because of terrorism, now because of disease).