THE DAY THAT CHANGED NYC FOREVER

Thirty years ago this month, six-year-old Etan Patz ran down the three flights from his SoHo loft, kissed his mother goodbye, dashed out his front door to head west on Prince Street, vanished somewhere on the next block as he approached West Broadway, and changed New York City forever.
That day -- May 25, 1979 -- was tow-headed Etan's first solo walk to the school bus stop on the corner.
When he didn't return, the sleepy city, emptying ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, jolted awake.
Police fanned out in a massive hunt through lower Manhattan, tearing through basements and sewers and closets of family friends.
As news of a possible child abduction spread from the close-knit artist community of SoHo through the city, it also put an end to a way of life -- one that allowed kids to run to corner stores, play unsupervised in neighborhood parks and dart around streetlamps and stoops for untended nighttime games of hide-and-seek and stickball.
Etan Patz was a child of a different city -- the looser, bohemian Manhattan that today's residents often regard with misty-eyed nostalgia. But that Manhattan also had frightening pockets of human depravity. Police, unequipped with computers, high-tech radios and quickly updated central databases, relied on beat smarts and word of mouth to investigate crimes -- and all too often were defeated by the chaos within their own overworked system. It was into that dark city that Etan Patz disappeared.

MOVING TO SOHO

Ramshackle 1970s SoHo was a perfect fit for Stan and Julie Patz. The young couple, married in 1965, scraped together $7,500 for an empty shell of a loft and gradually renovated it for their growing family, adding plumbing, floors and walls.
In their airy haven was space for Stan, 37, a commercial photographer, to carve out a personal photography studio, which Julie, 36, also used to run a day-care center for toddlers.
Their kids, Shira 8, Etan, 6, and Ari, 2, went to local schools. Their neighbors were of a similar pioneering mindset, fashioning homes out of abandoned industrial buildings.

FULL STORY HERE