Lower Manhattan’s textile district decayed as that industry relocated South

Evidence

Bounded by Italian tenement neighborhoods on the east and west, the area was known as “Hell’s Hundred Acres” or simply “The Valley.” Once a realm of grand hotels and upscale emporia, later the hub of New York’s wholesale dry-goods trade, the Valley waned and went to seed as the textile industry relocated to the South. A 1962 City Club report on “the wastelands of New York” deemed it a commercial slum, ripe for demolition. It was also something of a black hole. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1004