The Lost Neighborhood of Radio Row at NYC’s World Trade Center

At its peak, more than 300 businesses and over 30,000 employees were located there. Photos and first-person observation all speak to the clutter and home-grown nature of the neighborhood, with The New York Times calling it a “

.” Every storefront and shop interior was jam packed floor to ceiling with parts. Other enterprising businessmen competed by displaying goods on the street. And more than just radios, it was a destination for anything surplus including sheet metal and brass–basically anything one would need to create something. Think of it as a neighborhood-size Makerspace that spilled out into the streets.

Crowd gathers in Radio Row to hear news of JFK assassination. Photo from Library of Congress by Orlando Fernandez.

now in Queens, home to a major small-business auto repair industry being evicted in the name of environmental degradation and middle-class big box development.

The first proposal for a World Trade Center came pre-WWII in 1943. In the 1950s, David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, became involved with the World Trade Center as a way to spur business downtown, envisioning another large footprint development akin to his successful

.