BATTERY PARK CITY, NEW YORK - PROMOTIONAL POSTCARD SET 1970's Firstly, a history lesson... 'The notion of replacing 20 rotting Hudson River piers with a virtual new city first surfaced in 1962, the same year architectural work on the adjacent World Trade Center began. Land dug up to make way for the twin towers was deposited along the Hudson shore, and on it would be built Battery Park City. In a 1968 joint statement, Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay pledged that ''the city would earmark funds it would normally receive from new commercial and luxury developments to underwrite land costs for new low and middle-income housing.'' The construction of the 92-acre landfill was completed in 1976, when the city had slumped into a fiscal crisis, and the idea of developing Battery Park City as a mixed-income community was abandoned as quaintly utopian. The second mechanism by which Battery Park City was going to deliver on its stated mission - direct payments of $600 million in surplus revenues to the city government to support housing projects - has also been far from fully realized. Officials at the Battery Park City Authority, an agency created by the state in 1968 that collects rent and payments from landlords that are made in lieu of taxes, and pays off its debts, say they have lived up to the bargain by turning over millions of dollars to the city every year. As to what happened to the money the authority has given to the city, Timothy S. Carey, president of the authority, said that is a question the city should answer. City officials, though, say that they never really regarded the agreement as binding, and that the city has relied on a loophole in the agreement to spend the Battery Park money as it sees fit - sometimes for housing, but more often for other things. ''If all you are talking about is money, I am not going to speak to money,'' Deputy Mayor Robert M. Harding said, when asked if the city had honored its Battery Park City commitments. ''The city has done a remarkable job of putting new housing units on.'' But housing advocates in the city, as well as several of the original architects of the deal, say that the commitments made at Battery Park City's birth have not been honored...' Undated, but by all indications it's a mid-1970's original issue promotional postcard set showing the delights that were waiting for the new residents of Battery Park City... Images of aspirational life, plus a line drawing map of the new development. In good condition. Enthusiasts can examine it and decide just how much of the original dream still remains, 40 years later... Hours of fun!
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