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left by their owners before the storm. Store interiors are stripped down to plywood and wiring. Restaurants are chained shut, frozen in time, saddled with electrical systems that were ruined by several feet of salt water that raced up from the East River and through their front doors.
• "People have no clue that this corner of Manhattan has been hit so badly," said Adam Weprin, manager of the Bridge Cafe, one of the city's oldest bars that sits on a quiet street near the seaport. "Right now, it's a ghost town and a construction site."
• Nearly four months after the storm, roughly 85 percent of small businesses near the South Street Seaport are still boarded up. It could be months before some reopen, while others may never return. On Fulton Street, the wide tourist-friendly pedestrian walkway that comprises the seaport's main shopping district, not a single one of the major chain stores -- which include Coach, Ann Taylor and Brookstone -- has reopened.
• Among local business owners, there is a pervasive sense that their plight has been ignored by the rest of the city. A state senator who represents the area estimates at least 1,000 jobs were lost in lower Manhattan -- 450 of them in the seaport neighborhood alone.
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