After 9/11: An Overdue Homecoming

Updated
Battery Park City
Battery Park City

Of the myriad images to emerge from the rubble of September 11, one that didn't get much notice was the moving trucks.

More than 20,000 people were displaced from their homes in the days and weeks after 9/11. A great many would load those trucks, drive off, and never again call Lower Manhattan home.

Bernadette Grey was among them -- or so she thought. A decade later, not only has Grey and her family returned to Battery Park City (pictured above) but so too have droves of new residents.

Since 2001, the residential population of Lower Manhattan has more than doubled, from 22,961 before September 11 to 56,000 today, according to the Downtown Alliance, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. In the span of 10 years, the tragedy that brutalized the area at the start of the decade is now serving as the catalyst for a neighborhood's reinvention.

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