be replaced by a new arterial road, large public housing projects and a shopping mall. After various delays, those projects were either scaled back or abandoned entirely. In the interim many businesses either closed or moved out of downtown. Preservation and renewal In the late 1960s, public opposition to the planned demolition of some of the historic structures downtown like the McCarthy Building led to them being placed on the then-new National Register. In the early 1970s, the five predecessor historic districts were recognized and added as well, along with some other structures. Urban renewal programs are funded in part by federal grants. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which created the NRHP, requires that federal agencies give consideration to the opinions of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation in assessing the impact their actions will have on listed properties and consider alternatives to any action that would destroy or significantly affect them. The listings of downtown Troy's districts and buildings therefore had the practical effect of preventing their demolition for urban renewal. By the 1980s, after a Troy Downtown Historic District had been declared eligible for the NRHP by the state's Historic Preservation Office but not yet submitted to the National Park Service (NPS), which administers the Register, local preservationists realized that the existing historic districts did not fully embrace all of downtown's historic properties. Instead of applying for boundary increases or nominating more individual properties to the Register, the city decided to merge all five into a new, central district. The NPS accepted the application and entered the new district on the Register in 1986. Troy's downtown began reviving. In 1993, Martin Scorsese used the Second Street area, particularly the Paine Mansion, and some of the Russell Sage buildings as locations for his adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, since they replicated the appearance of 1870s Manhattan. River Street became home to many antique stores. Developers began buying the old buildings and adapting them to contemporary uses. RPI began buying properties such as the Rice and Gurley buildings, moving students and faculty into them. In 2006, The New York Times described the city as having "one of the most perfectly preserved 19th-century downtowns in the United States." The district's success led to the proposed expansion in 2014. Significant contributing properties The district includes all the area of the original five districts, two National Historic Landmarks,