Q. How many people were displaced by the construction of Lincoln Center, and what happened to them?

A. Lincoln Center was the crown-jewel project of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, which was overseen by Robert Moses, the man who reshaped the city in the mid-20th century. The “urban renewal” plan, which leveled 18 city blocks on the Upper West Side, also included educational, commercial and residential facilities.

The project displaced more than 7,000 lower-class families and 800 businesses. Few, if any, of the 4,400 new housing units were intended for the area’s previous residents, who were almost exclusively black and Hispanic. Even worse, the relocation assistance promised by the committee never materialized.

“Moses was not making even a pretense of creating new homes for the families displaced,” Robert A. Caro wrote in “The Power Broker,” the Pulitzer-winning biography of the planning czar’s life and career.

Many of these evicted New Yorkers instead crammed into other low-income areas like Harlem and parts of the Bronx, deepening the rift of segregation and, ironically, creating new slums in a different part of the city.