Giving thanks for the new downtown

NO part of town has more to give thanks for this holiday weekend than lower Manhattan — a once-fading district that’s now home to more than 60,000 residents, new stores and restaurants, cutting-edge media and tech companies and a familyfriendly, 24/7 vibe for the first time since the New York Stock Exchange opened on Wall Street in 1792.

But a “part of town” is not the same as a human being, and those who lost loved ones on 9/11 surely have less to celebrate. The realization rattled me at a new exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park City, “Millennium: Lower Manhattan in the 1990s.” (39 Battery Place, noon-6 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday, through April.)

The show’s program calls today’s downtown “a model of a 21st-century environment of living, work and play.” Yet, just 20 years ago, the neighborhood seemed to be on its last legs. Photos, models, architectural drawings and news accounts recall how the district was reeling from aftershocks of the 1987 Black Monday stock-market crash. Banks fled to Midtown, leaving older skyscrapers dark. A handful of residents lived amid long shadows of office towers empty after 5 p.m. “Once-grand banking halls and storefronts” stood “hauntingly silent,” the show reminds us.

The Wall Street area of the 1990s was “ripe for reinvention,” the exhibition tells us. But nobody knew how to do that. Not until Sept. 11, 2001, was “downtown’s identity . . . cataclysmically recast as Ground Zero, and a new era truly begun.”

Translation: It took the slaughter of 2,606 people and the destruction of 14 million square feet of offices to bring forth not patchwork change, but a sweeping reconception. Downtown today otherwise would resemble the same struggling place it was before the attacks.

To accept that heart-wrenching truth brings up morally charged questions that “Millennium” delicately avoids tackling head-on.