Two months after 9/11, the New York Times Magazine published a special issue titled “Beginnings—an Issue About the Next New York.” Its theme reflected an urban-planning zeitgeist far removed from the workaday world of business and real estate: it was time for something completely different. “The attack may hasten the end of moneyed Manhattan’s glittering excesses,” enthused one writer, an outcome that would be “just fine.” One architect declared of Ground Zero, the destroyed World Trade Center site, that “we should not rebuild the superblock. The World Trade Center was basically a shopping mall with the towers and the other buildings on top of it. . . . [T]here’s this amazing opportunity.” More than a year later, New Yorkers were puzzling over a fantastical state-driven “master plan” for the site, centered on an unbuildable “spire” of a tower.
What is striking from the perspective of a quarter-century later is not how much New York’s economy and cityscape changed after 9/11 but how much they didn’t. Eventually—after years of disputes and delays between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the site, and developer Larry Silverstein, who held the development rights under a long-term lease—New York rebuilt the superblock, replacing most of the roughly 12 million square feet of space lost at the Twin Towers complex with four architecturally unremarkable but perfectly serviceable curtain-wall glass towers. The first opened in 2006; the most recent, in 2018. The Oculus, the indoor public space connecting the towers, is a high-end mall; elsewhere in the complex are a food court and an Eataly. If you were waiting for Manhattan to rein in its “excesses” after its people were attacked, you would still be waiting. The greatest success of Lower Manhattan’s rebuilding is how normal it all turned out.
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The fact that 9/11 changed so little in this regard was a good thing. What New York had done in the two decades before the attacks to recover from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s had worked well. The city’s basic strategy, alongside driving down crime beginning in the early 1990s, was simple: grow the private-sector economy by encouraging the development of office buildings and apartments to attract high-paying white-collar jobs and workers. Those jobs, along with tourism, would replace the manufacturing base that had been leaving the city since the mid-twentieth century. In 2000, just before the dot-com bubble burst, New York had come tantalizingly close to reaching 3.8 million jobs, a level not seen since the city’s 1969 peak.
Though Gotham fell just short of that total before companies began shedding jobs in the months leading up to 9/11, the city, having recovered so robustly from the downturns of the early 1980s and 1990s, had demonstrated that it could weather recessions without falling into structural decline or suffering the prolonged job and population losses of the 1970s. As William Dudley, then-president of the New York Federal Reserve, put it in a 2016 speech: “By the mid-1980s, the resiliency of the city’s economy was becoming more apparent. Citywide employment barely declined during the wrenching recessions of the early 1980s—the first time in a long while that the city’s economy had outperformed the nation’s.” That momentum held through the turn of the millennium. By 2000, the 1987 stock-market crash and the ensuing early 1990s recession seemed like “just a hiccup in what ultimately turned out to be a remarkable upturn in the city’s performance and prospects.”
Moreover, the jobs being created were well suited to a city attracting both educated and manual workers from around the country and the world. New York expanded its white-collar (professional and business services) employment by 25 percent between 1990 and 2000, demonstrating that even as it continued to lose financial-industry jobs, it could replace them with new positions in technology, law, and other sectors. The city also increased its information-sector employment by more than 10 percent, showing that it could become a national hub not only for old media but also for new digital media. Finally, the booming tourist sector—with employment growth of nearly 18 percent since 1990—created jobs, many of them well-paying, for restaurant and hotel workers as well as performers and entertainers.
And though the financial sector itself grew more slowly, each new position at the top of this increasingly rarefied industry paid far more, with annual bonuses skyrocketing from an average of $15,500 per person in 1990 to $100,500 by 2000. Wall Street’s move upmarket generated ample tax revenue to support a massive public-sector workforce as well as ever more redistributive spending on homelessness and social services. By 2000, the city’s population had topped 8 million, crossing another key psychological threshold: New York had finally regained the 1 million residents it had lost during the 1970s.
In the months after 9/11, as the Ground Zero fires continued to smolder, it was no surprise that New York voters, despite all the talk of “rethinking,” “reimagining,” and the like, instead chose continuity. That November, they elected Michael R. Bloomberg, a political unknown, with barely a majority vote, even as the New York Times endorsed Bloomberg’s opponent, Mark Green, a traditional New York Democratic politico. After the trauma they had just suffered, New Yorkers were apparently determined to preserve a city led by private-sector growth.
The instinct was sound. Bloomberg made some missteps at Ground Zero, including, as Silverstein recounted in his memoir, dismissing the idea that Lower Manhattan needed millions of square feet of new office space. But the mayor changed his mind when the market proved him wrong, and he was instrumental in persuading Goldman Sachs, the marquee investment bank, to keep its headquarters near the Trade Center site. Many of the city’s top-tier private-sector companies and jobs have continued moving to Midtown; but Lower Manhattan, by sticking to pragmatic development, has built and retained a vibrant economy of its own, with Trade Center tenants including Condé Nast, Moody’s, Spotify, and top-tier law and marketing firms. New York finally surpassed its 1969 jobs peak in 2008 and then powered through the Great Recession, recovering lost jobs more quickly than the nation as a whole. Between 2009 and 2018, the state comptroller noted, “the current expansion is not only the largest on record, but also the fastest,” with the city gaining more than 800,000 jobs in less than a decade, “nearly double the number added in the 1992–2000 job expansion.”
On the eve of the 2020 pandemic, the city had nearly 4.6 million jobs, including tens of thousands at the new World Trade Center, and its population was pushing past 8.5 million. September 11 was receding into history—an event that had marked the city with tragedy but had not harmed Gotham over the long term. Any worker or visitor downtown would encounter a Class A office campus that could belong to any leading global business district. New York didn’t reimagine itself because it didn’t need to.
Since the lockdowns of 2020, New York has struggled to resume its four-decade trajectory. The city’s job growth has lagged the nation’s, with tourism-related employment still nearly 4 percent below its 2019 level. Though professional and business employment has grown by 3 percent since then, that growth stalled in 2024–25, mirroring a national trend. Artificial intelligence may be cutting into the city’s entry-level office jobs, but New York’s status as a high-tax city whose public services—particularly its infrastructure—have failed to keep pace with its previous growth may also be weighing on its prospects, as Florida and Texas successfully compete for high-paying jobs.
Worse, after choosing continuity in the wake of 9/11, the city is once again talking about “reimagining” itself. New York’s Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, represents a decisive break from the approach that prevailed from the 1980s through the pandemic: support private-sector growth, the only reliable source of the tax revenues needed to sustain big government. Many previous mayors, from Bloomberg himself to Bill de Blasio, pursued taxes on high earners, but Mamdani has often seemed to want to drive wealthy executives out altogether.
In early July, however, the mayor helped break ground on 2 World Trade Center, the last of the five office towers to rise from the destruction downtown. Standing alongside executives from Silverstein Properties—Larry Silverstein, now 95, remains the site’s builder—Mamdani cheered not just the skyscraper’s symbolic significance but its practical impact as the future home of American Express and a driver of New York’s economy. “This building will support approximately 21,250 jobs,” Mamdani crowed. “It will be a story of growth.”
Most of New York’s post-9/11 mayors could have given this appropriately boosterish speech. But Mamdani’s words were notable because, unlike those predecessors (with the exception of Bill de Blasio), he hadn’t won office the previous year on a growth platform. The word was missing from his victory and inauguration speeches, and whenever he talked about real-estate developers and big corporations, it was to use them as a foil.
That even Mamdani, seven months into office, has begun to recognize that New York City must grow before it can do much else is a testament to the strength of a long-running economic consensus—one durable enough to withstand the losses of a day that a generation of New Yorkers will never forget.