New York's losses are far more heartbreaking then a couple of square miles of workmen's woodframe cottages and 19th-warehouses that most of these photos show.
Penn Station, hundreds of 19th-century mansions along Park ave and elsewhere, the Singer building, burned apartments in the Bronx, historic row houses galore...torn down for 50-story modernist boxes.
It would have been easy to replace and rebuild most of the midwestern areas (it still would be in the case of St Louis or Detroit) in something like their original form. The $$$ weren't there though, they were going to building places like this:
^^ west Detroit.