Some of the dancers at the recently concluded Downtown Dance Festival in Battery Park City came from far-flung parts of the world - India, Spain, Romania and South Africa. But many of the people in the audience were locals who returned to the festival night after night. "You're culture vultures," Jonathan Hollander, the artistic director of the festival, teased.

He founded the festival 33 years ago on Stone Street in the Financial District. In previous years, the dancers performed on streets, in plazas and in historic Battery Park. But this year, because of construction and other issues, none of those places was available.

The Battery Park City Authority came to the rescue, hosting the festival in Wagner Park from Aug. 17 to Aug. 21. With the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty in the background, the setting could not have been more appropriate.

Though certain dancers and dances stood out, the festival as a whole had its own gestalt. It had to do with liberty and its absence. There was a clear difference in sensibility between the work of the American dance companies and that of the Europeans. The American work tended to be optimistic and upbeat. The Europeans expressed a familiarity with hardship and brutality that most Americans have never known.

The festival opened on Aug. 17 with a performance by the spirited Vanaver Caravan, honoring the late Pete Seeger and his lifetime commitment to music and social justice. The youthful company danced to music from the 1960s ("Turn, Turn, Turn," "To Everything There is a Season," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and the like) and to music from the 1930s that also expressed idealism and protest. Even though a song might grow sad, there was still the promise of a better future.

Entomo EA&AE from Spain.

Not so in the dancing of Entomo EA&AE, a duo from Spain, who performed on the second night of the festival and again on the last night. Alvaro Esteban and Elias Aguirre, dressed in dark colors, were human at times in their actions and sometimes behaved like insects crawling through the mud.

Spain has had a tragic history. The dictator Francisco Franco, who enforced his will with the dreaded Guardia Civil, died just 39 years ago. The bloody Spanish Civil War is only three generations in the past, and well within living memory. Currently, Spain is experiencing economic hardship. It is not surprising that these dancers saw little hope for the human race.

Tangaj Dance from Romania.

The dance that the Romanian company, Tangaj Dance, presented on the last night of the festival was even more harsh. It depicted the conformity imposed by dictatorship and the brutality it engendered. This dance included a sexual encounter in which an innocent, young woman was all but raped,  with the collusion of her "friends."

The Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was executed in 1989 after inflicting years of cruelty and hardship on the Romanian people. Some of the dancers in Tangaj Dance were undoubtedly born during his regime or shortly thereafter.

The company was formed only last year and came to the festival barefooted, with costumes that consisted of t-shirts, shorts, hoodies, and pants - perhaps reflecting a slim budget - but nothing more was needed. The dancers turned in a gut-wrenching performance as they grappled with wounds that have yet to heal.

The last dance in the festival was a still unnamed piece performed by Jonathan Hollander's Battery Dance Company in collaboration with Theo Ndindwa, a choreographer from Cape Town, South Africa. He co-founded and directs Arts Township International, an arts organization that works in the townships surrounding Cape Town. Though apartheid ended in the early 1990s, poverty and numerous social problems still exist in these formerly segregated communities.

Ndindwa's dance was energetic and even exuberant. Repeatedly, the dancers leaped into air, soaring above the Statue of Liberty, visible in the background. Maybe despite the many problems of the past some of that American optimism has rubbed off.

Bits & Bytes

Downtown history

As part of this year's River to River Festival, a dance by Maria Hassabi took place on the plaza at Bowling Green. Behind the dancers is the facade of 2 Broadway, designed by Emory Roth & Sons and erected in 1958-1959. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

Until 57 years ago, there was a lavish red brick building at 2 Broadway where a nondescript modern building now stands. No one would particularly notice what's there now. No one could have escaped noticing what preceded it.

George B. Post's New York Produce Exchange

In an article in The New York Times entitled "A Brick Beauty Bites the Dust," (8/21/14), Christopher Gray tells what happened to architect George B. Post's masterpiece, the New York Produce Exchange.

"The preservation movement may have been born when Penn Station was demolished in 1963, but it had a long period of gestation," says Gray. "Probably the most regretted structure to be taken down in the years before the station fell was George B. Post's colossal New York Produce Exchange, on the east side of Broadway, opposite Bowling Green. The giant 1884 brick hall was a monument to a time when wheat, oil and other commodities were central to the New York economy. Founded in 1861, the produce exchange served a nationwide network of produce and commodities dealers, and in 1881 they began building the most impressive exchange structure ever seen in Manhattan."

Gray describes the building as "an arcaded fortress, as noble as anything in Florence, but in fiery red brick."

The George B. Post building at 142 Beekman St. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

The building survived until 1957, when it was demolished. "Nathan Silver, in his prescient 1967 book, 'Lost New York,' cut to the quick: 'The produce exchange, one of the best buildings in New York, was replaced after 1957 by one of the worst,'" says Gray.

The attempted and actual destruction of New York City's past continues. In Lower Manhattan, the battle is being waged at the South Street Seaport, whose history as a port, trading center and marketplace goes back to the 17th century. Some of the buildings in the Seaport are more than 200 years old.

Gray mentions in his article that Post covered his Produce Exchange "with inventive ornament, ships' prows at the corners, medallions of corn, cows and pigs elsewhere."

Though the Produce Exchange is gone, a George B. Post building survives in the Seaport, and it, too, is covered with terracotta ornaments that reference its setting and its usage. At the corner of Beekman and Front Streets (No. 142 Beekman St.) is a handsome, red brick building decorated with fish motifs, cockleshells and starfish. The Seaport building dates from 1885 and was designed by Post for a descendent of the wealthy Schermerhorn family, who had built Schermerhorn Row on Fulton Street.

Although the Produce Exchange is gone, at least something of Post's work at that time remains.

"Graybeards who mourn the rich red brick of the produce exchange must be few in number by now," Gray observes. "At the time no one mobilized or picketed or raised any ruckus. But its passing became one of those subliminal 'aha' moments, a ready reference in the collective consciousness of New Yorkers that something valuable was slipping away, piece by piece."

The South Street Seaport Museum's lightship, Ambrose, welcomes visitors Wednesdays to Sundays on Pier 16. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)