Over the last decade, the landscape of New York City has seen an unprecedented amount of change. Luxury towers and megaprojects rose across the city, and miles of previously off-limits coastline were transformed into new waterfront parks. Numerous neighborhoods were reconstructed in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. And thousands of small businesses and historic buildings were wiped out by soaring rents and waves of gentrification.

Many of these changes were set in motion by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the eighth-richest person in America, who was in office until 2014. (He’s now vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.) Under his administration, approximately 40 percent of New York’s landmass was rezoned, allowing for the construction of over 214,000 new housing units. But the results have not been pretty, especially in the low-income and industrial neighborhoods that were bulldozed under the threat of eminent domain.

“The city [Bloomberg] turned over to Bill de Blasio in 2014 was increasingly caricatured as a playground for the rich,” the New York Times recently wrote. “Slender new skyscrapers on Billionaire’s Row had begun to cast shadows on Central Park. Neighborhoods that had seen little investment in years were bracing for gentrification. Income inequality ranked among the widest of major cities in America.”

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the long-term impacts of the Bloomberg era have continued to play out. Despite de Blasio’s early campaign promises to help improve the lives of lower-income New Yorkers, “reducing the vast wealth of the city’s top earners is out of a mayor’s grasp,” and the problem of income inequality has not improved. Instead, de Blasio has been accused of “being chummy with the developers he promised to hold to account.”

As new development projects and rezonings reshaped the city, it also lost countless historic buildings and cultural institutions; dive bars, bungalows, churches, and even entire neighborhoods were wiped off the map. The 10 buildings and neighborhoods below were just a few of the city’s unique places demolished during a decade of destruction.

The destruction of Manhattanville, an industrial neighborhood on the western edge of Harlem, has been unfolding since 2003, when Columbia University announced its plans to replace several blocks with a 17-acre campus extension. In 2008, the state government declared its waterfront blighted, allowing Columbia to use the threat of eminent domain to force out local business owners. In 2010, after the Supreme Court declined to hear the owners’ appeals, demolition began in earnest. Manhattanville is still being torn down today, and first new buildings of the university’s $6.3 billion project are now open.

What has been erased in Manhattanville is the same type of vernacular architecture that is vanishing throughout New York City: diners and tenement buildings, cobblestone streets and slaughterhouses, auto body shops and horse stables. “These were not remarkable buildings, in the sense of high design; a lot of them were vernacular. But often, that’s what makes a neighborhood really exciting,” historian and author Eric K. Washington said in 2018. “They were of cultural interest. They revealed the soul of the neighborhood, and what made it important.”

Rezonings proposed by the de Blasio administration have threatened similar low-income residential and industrial neighborhoods throughout the city. These include Inwood, where the forgotten waterfront is home to a vibrant array of car repair shops, restaurants, and nightclubs; and Jerome Avenue, where a recent rezoning has already resulted in the first demolitions on a strip of dozens of auto body shops. Critics have described the city’s widespread use of rezoning over the last 20 years as a systemically racist practice that has increased segregation in New York City. Nevertheless, the city is currently considering rezonings in several other historically industrial neighborhoods, including Gowanus, Bushwick, and Sunset Park.

The Cedar Grove Beach Club, which opened in 1911, was New York City’s last summertime bungalow community, where homes were built directly on the beach near the Atlantic Ocean. This unique getaway managed to survive for a century, a final holdout from when Staten Island’s east coast was known as “The Poor Man’s Bermuda.”

Generations of Staten Island residents grew up in these simple one-story structures, passing them down from family member to family member. In a unique arrangement, the city owned the land here, and leased it back to the bungalow owners after using eminent domain to seize land for a Robert Moses parkway that was never built. In 2010, the Parks Department decided to end its 50-year-old agreement, evicting the bungalow owners from their summer homes. In 2012, the city demolished the last of its 41 houses to make way for a new park. The bungalows have now been replaced by a public bathroom.

The Cedar Grove Beach Club was torn down just in time to spare it from an even worse fate. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy inundated the coast of Staten Island with an enormous storm surge, devastating nearby bungalow communities in New Dorp Beach and Oakwood Beach. Before the storm, only two homes were still standing at Cedar Grove Beach, which the city had planned to incorporate into its new park. After the storm, they were deemed unsalvageable and destroyed, erasing the last remnants of the century-old community.

Many of New York City’s bungalow colonies have been badly damaged over the last decade, either by development or by Hurricane Sandy. Of the thousands of summer bungalows that once stood along the coast, just a few hundred now remain. The city’s last historic bungalow colonies in Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay and throughout the Rockaways now face a tenuous future that is further threatened by sea level rise.

At the northern end of Staten Island, a neo-medieval castle once stood on a hilltop, looking out over the New York harbor. Described as “a fairy-tale palace” and “one of the most important, beloved, and beautiful buildings on Staten Island” by the Staten Island Advance, this was the Frost Memorial Tower, which opened in 1890 as part of the Samuel R. Smith Infirmary, the borough’s first hospital complex. Generations of Staten Islanders were born here.

After 122 years, the castle was a decaying ruin filled with graffiti, its roof collapsing. Despite the efforts of local preservationists, the building was denied official landmark status, and was bulldozed in 2012 to make way for development plans that have yet to materialize. All that remains from this historic hospital today is a stone wall bordering an empty six-acre lot.

“Staten Island and the North Shore are less rich historically and architecturally for the loss of this building,” John Kilcullen, the president of the Preservation League of Staten Island, told the Staten Island Advance in 2012. “It just shows you there was no plan of action.… Neighborhoods of the same vintage have redeveloped around architecturally historic buildings of significance.”

The same story has unfolded in communities around the city, where numerous hospitals, churches, schools, and other civic structures were allowed to deteriorate to the point of collapse. Even the protection of the Landmarks Preservation Commission has not been enough to save some abandoned landmarks from the wrecking ball. In 2015, P.S. 31 in the Bronx, a city landmark built in the 1890s, was destroyed after years of neglect. And just this year, the Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Synagogue, an official landmark dating back to the 1850s, was partially torn down after it was gutted by arson in 2017.

The 19th-century warehouse complex in Long Island City that once held 5 Pointz was previously home to the Neptune Meter Company, the largest manufacturer of water meters in the world. Neptune’s meters are now in the collection of the National Museum of American History, but the company’s old factory became famous many years after it had moved out.

Described as “a Graffiti Mecca” and the “United Nations of Graffiti,” 5 Pointz was one of the most popular tourist destinations in Queens, if not all of New York City. Thousands of visitors thronged to its building to watch street artists from around the world create colorful artworks on the buildings’ exterior walls. Despite its cultural importance, 5 Pointz was whitewashed in 2013 by the building’s owner, Jerry Wolkoff, who then proceeded to bulldoze the entire block in 2014. Like much of Long Island City, the historic warehouse complex was replaced by a pair of luxury apartment towers.

The death of 5 Pointz was undoubtedly a tragic blow for graffiti artists, but it was also part of a much larger loss for Queens history. In the past decade, almost all of the warehouses and factories around nearby Court Square were bulldozed. These include the West Chemical complex on Jackson Avenue, where the long-abandoned industrial warehouses had become a time capsule of Queens history. That complex was also demolished in 2014 to make way for new apartment buildings.

Over the last decade, few neighborhoods in New York City have undergone as radical a change as Long Island City, where the industrial past has been almost completely erased to make way for a collection of soulless glass towers. A walk through its streets today is a disorienting experience, with almost all of the older neighborhood landmarks gone. A similar transformation has permanently altered many other neighborhoods, including Harlem, Williamsburg, and the East Village.

In Harlem, a wave of generic apartment buildings has replaced cultural landmarks, including the Harlem Renaissance Ballroom and Casino, also known as the Renny. During its heyday, this block-long complex, located on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at West 137th Street, was home to a 900-seat theater and a grand ballroom that previously hosted a cavalcade of African-American icons, including Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Joe Louis.

After 50 years of hosting events, the Renny fell on hard times and ultimately shuttered in 1979. By 2009, the entire complex was in ruinous condition, with collapsing ceilings and rotting floors. But hints of its original grandeur remained, and local preservationists insisted it could be saved. However, the building was denied official landmark status, and its owner, the Abyssinian Development Corporation (the real estate arm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church) sold the entire complex to a developer, which demolished it in 2014 to make way for apartments.

For preservationists, the loss of the Renny represented a “cultural and historical catastrophe” that was part of the larger erasure of Harlem’s landmarks over the past decade, including the destruction of the Lenox Lounge in 2017. “There is nothing left. This is it,” Michael Henry Adams, an author, historian and activist, told the New York Times in 2014. “You can name streets after dead black leaders all you want, but what’s left for people to see? It’s cultural genocide.”

The luxury condo that replaced the Renny is called The Rennie, and still has several available apartments, ranging in price from $650,000 for a studio to $1.5 million for a three-bedroom. The building’s website touts its proximity to several of Harlem’s “preeminent cultural institutions,” including Striver’s Row and the Apollo Theater, but includes no mention of the historic cultural institution that it replaced.

The Domino Sugar Refinery, which dates back to 1882, was once one of the most recognizable parts of the Williamsburg waterfront. The factory’s iconic yellow sign looked out over the East River for decades, and a section of its campus was declared a city landmark in 2007, a rare preservation victory for Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront. In 2014, however, most of the historic complex was demolished to make way for several enormous apartment towers.

The Domino site today is a sad reminder of how much of the borough’s industrial history has been erased over the last two decades, as refineries, powerhouses, and shipyards have been bulldozed to make way for new development. In Williamsburg and Greenpoint, this process began in 2005, when the city rezoned 75 blocks along 375 acres of waterfront. What followed was a frenzied land grab, as real estate developers demolished hundreds of humble structures and replaced them with over 17,000 new units of housing.

The end result of this rezoning is the erasure of the old waterfront and the rise of a new, wealthier community packed into 30- and 40-story towers. “The images of Williamsburg in the wake of a gold rush are not attractive,” the New York Times wrote in 2013. “It is a mostly ugly architectural mishmash executed without an overall vision, beyond the prospect for developers of making as much money as quickly as possible.”

At Domino, the remnants of the demolished warehouses were scavenged and reused to spruce up a new waterfront park built next to the apartment towers, like bones picked from a decaying carcass and turned into a macabre sculpture. The old piers, where hundreds of local workers once processed sugar and molasses, have become a sugar-refinery themed playground; there are also bocce courts, beach volleyball, and a Danny Meyer taco bar.

The landscape of the Brooklyn Navy Yard has also been changed by new development projects. At the beginning of this decade, the Navy Yard was filled with abandoned and half-empty industrial buildings, left to rot by the government. Today, many of these historic structures have been renovated and reopened, alongside several new and markedly different structures built alongside them.

The most dramatic change is the addition of a Wegmans supermarket, which opened earlier this year at the former site of Admiral’s Row. To create this five-story building and its sprawling parking lot, Steiner NYC demolished nine 19th-century mansions. Although these homes were abandoned by the government in the 1970s and left to become an overgrown ruin, preservationists insisted that the buildings could have been saved and fought to have them landmarked. Despite those efforts, Admiral’s Row was unceremoniously bulldozed in 2016, leaving just one house standing.

”We are losing a memory of what was there, and what life was really like in the 19th century,” Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, said in 2016. “We are losing our past. We are losing any kind of sense of continuity with the people who lived here, worked here, and built the place we are living in now… It is an ugly thing to live in a timeless place.”

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation has also allowed private developers to construct several other out-of-place structures around its campus, which is owned by the city. These include Dock 72, a 16-story office building, and Building 303, a nine-story parking garage and industrial space. The Navy Yard has plans to build several more towers in the coming years, creating 5.1 million square feet of offices and manufacturing spaces, which will further alter its historic fabric.

The Iron Triangle was one of the most unique industrial neighborhoods in New York City, where hundreds of car repair shops vied for customers amidst flooded and unmaintained city streets. Numerous films were made about its small businesses, which once employed thousands of local workers. Located in Willets Point next to Citi Field, much of this community has now been erased to make way for the city’s development plans, leaving behind a handful of shops in an apocalyptic landscape surrounded by blocked-off streets.

“Cleaning up or clearing out Willets Point has been a goal of nearly every mayor since the 1950s,” according to the New York Times; it took Bloomberg and de Blasio more than a decade to empty out the neighborhood using the threat of eminent domain. Under Bloomberg, the Iron Triangle was set to become a $3 billion megaproject with residential towers and a mall. That didn’t come to pass, but the de Blasio administration has its own proposal that could include apartment buildings, a soccer stadium, a school, and affordable housing.

These changes would directly benefit Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, the owners of the Mets. Their company, Sterling Equities, was chosen by both Bloomberg and de Blasio to head up the redevelopment of the neighborhood, along with Related Companies. However, Wilpon and Katz are now in negotiations to sell a majority share of the Mets to billionaire Steve Cohen, in a $2.6 billion deal which could throw in the right to develop Willets Point as a “sweetener.”

“I mean, these are billionaires we are talking about. These are the games billionaires play with each other. And the small guys, the taxpayers, wind up footing the bill for it,” Gerald Antonacci, a local business owner, said in the 2017 documentary film The Iron Triangle. “The conditions in Willets Point are like a third world country. We have streets, but they look like they have been bombed. There’s potholes all over the place, no sanitation services… And now they want to come and take our property, to blame us for their neglect.”

Like the Iron Triangle, the unique industrial landscape surrounding the Gowanus Canal has also been slowly erased, with many of its iconic structures demolished, including the Kentile Floors sign and the Burns Brothers Coal Pockets. But the destruction of the S.W. Bowne Grain Storehouse in 2019 was one of the most dispiriting defeats for local preservationists.

Built in 1896, the four-story structure remained in remarkably good condition up until 2018, when its upper floors were burned by arson. Prior to the fire, preservationists tried to landmark the building for more than a decade, to no avail. After the blaze, the building’s owner, the Chetrit Group, began demolition work, and the building was completely destroyed this fall.

Preservationists fear that a much larger wave of demolition will be unleashed when the city announces its rezoning plans for the neighborhood. Most of the properties around the Gowanus Canal have already been bought by real estate speculators, who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of the anticipated rezoning, waiting for the opportunity to bulldoze those low-slung warehouses.

This fall, however, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission issued a rare ruling in favor of industrial architecture, when it designated five canal-adjacent properties as official city landmarks. A small portion of the neighborhood may now be preserved, thanks to the work of the Gowanus Landmarking Coalition, a collection of local preservation groups.

Over the past decade, dozens of small businesses and historic buildings have been lost in the East Village and the Lower East Side, where the forces of hyper-gentrification have decimated the soul of those old neighborhoods. Some businesses were diminutive in size, including one-room dive bars like the Mars Bar, torn down in 2011 to make way for a bank branch, and the Blarney Cove, demolished in 2014 so a block-long residential building could rise. Others were larger; the old Essex Street Market buildings were torn down to make way for its Essex Crossing megaproject, where a new Essex Market now has a home.

But the demolition of Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema may be most emblematic of the erasure of the neighborhoods’ character. Originally housing a Dutch Reformed Church that dated back to 1844, the Houston Street building went on to house a boxing club, a Yiddish theater, and a hardware store warehouse, before reopening in 2001 as a five-screen movie theater. The historic building, which was denied official landmark status, was demolished in 2019 to make way for a nine-story office tower.

For those who have been documenting New York’s transformation over the last decade, these losses have not been part of the natural evolution of the city. New York has always been a dynamic place that changes and reinvents itself. But these recent developments represent something different, where billionaires and politicians conspired to maximize private profits and enrich private developers by destroying thousands of small businesses and dozens of neighborhoods.

“It is not a natural change. It’s very deliberate, it’s very planned. It’s from policies, and the policies have values behind them, and the values are very clear. They favor the already better off,” Jeremiah Moss, the author of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, said in a 2017 interview. “I do believe that we have a society that values greed. This is part of why we have the government we have now. This is why things are falling apart.”