Manhattan has changed greatly in the past 40 years — the once drug and crime-ridden streets of the Lower East Side are now filled with luxury high rise apartments and retail shops.
Photographer Brian Rose has been documenting that change since the late 1970s. Focusing his camera on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Rose documented the Financial District with a careful eye.
His new book, "WTC," is a collection of images taken between 1977 to present day that are an ode to the World Trade Center.
Ahead, 29 images that show the dramatic change the Financial District has endured since then.
SEE ALSO: 18 stunning photos from the night the Berlin Wall came down 27 years ago
Rose began documenting the Manhattan streets when he was a student at Cooper Union in 1977.
At that time, the two World Trade Center towers were still relatively new — the North Tower opened to tenants in 1970, the South Tower in 1972.
"For some the towers were the seed of future development in Lower Manhattan, but to others it was an expensive eyesore out of touch with the economic state of the city," Sean Corcoran wrote in the introduction to "WTC."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider