as a handful of landlords wait for retailers willing to pay their exorbitant rents.

The results have brought this once-bustling corridor to its knees, with dozens of small businesses driven out and dozens of shuttered storefronts, leaving behind an atrophied landscape for the millions of pedestrians who pass by every day. As Canal Street waits for its future to be decided, it sits in limbo, in an uncertain moment of transition.

553 Canal Street: The Spring Street Salt Shed marks the western end of Canal Street, where it meets West Street. This monolithic concrete structure, a $20 million Sanitation Department building, was designed by Dattner Architects and completed in 2015. Praised as The Sydney Opera House of salt sheds, the building is eye-catching from a distance; up close, it hasplaced a 69-foot-high concrete wall along the sidewalk, creating an unfriendly pedestrian landscape.

538-542 Canal Street, aka 290 West Street: At the opposite intersection of Canal and West Street sits an anonymous 11-story glass tower, which also opened in 2015. Designed by Adjmi & Andreoli, this luxury apartment complex has no retail space on the ground floor, leaving pedestrians to face a generic wall of glass.

502-510 Canal Street: A number of other luxury apartment buildings now loom over this end of Canal Street, lining the sidewalk with blank walls. 471 Washington, at the corner of Canal and Washington Street, was designed by Ben Hansen Architect, and “is filled with rich young millionaires” that “like to stay under the radar,” according to the New York Times.

486-500 Canal, aka 475 Greenwich: