Bucharest had taken significant damage due to Allied bombing during World War II (see Romania during World War II) and the earthquake of March 4, 1977 (see Bucharest earthquake of 1977). However, neither of these changed the face of the city as much as the redevelopment schemes of the 1980s, under which eight square kilometers in the historic center of Bucharest were leveled, including monasteries, churches, synagogues, a hospital, and a noted Art Deco sports stadium. 40,000 people were evicted with only a single day's notice to make way for the grandiose Centru Civic and the megalomaniacal Palace of the People, now officially renamed as the Palace of Parliament, a building second in size only to the Pentagon.
The Centru Civic is a complex of rather faceless modern concrete buildings with marble façades, centered on a boulevard originally known as the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, renamed after the 1989 revolution as Unification ("Unirii") Boulevard. The Boulevard, a few meters longer than Paris's Champs Elysées, runs roughly east-west, constituting a grand approach to the Palace of the People at its western terminus. A grand balcony in the Palace surveys the entire length of the boulevard.
The Centru Civic includes numerous government offices and apartments, the latter being roughly equal in number to the housing units destroyed for its construction. The apartments were originally intended to house Romania's communist elite, but the completed complex is a rather bland and unappealing neighborhood, certainly not a preferred residence for the city's new capitalist elite, with the possible exception of buildings that look out on the now-bustling Unirea Square, where the Centru Civic bisects the Dâmboviţa River, which is channelled underground past the Square.
The facelessness and placelessness of the Centru Civic is due not only to its architectural uniformity, but also to having been designed in accord with Ceauşescu's general hostility to commerce. Few spaces were left for retail business of any sort, leaving the Centru Civic nearly devoid of the small shops and restaurants found in the areas immediately to its north. The few street-facing business spaces in the Centru Civic retain a cold, communist-era look.
As one goes east, the eerie bleakness of the western part of the Centru Civic gives way to the outright devastation of the eastern portion, known to Bucharesteans as "Hiroshima". Construction cranes, disused and rusting since Ceauşescu was overthrown, hover over the concrete hulks of half-completed buildings whose vacant windows, in turn, stare out onto pits of rubble, where historic buildings (including much of the city's historic Jewish quarter) once stood; street dogs roam the neighborhood from which their one-time masters are long departed.
Although the destruction of historic Bucharest for the Centru Civic was extensive, it was not total. Nearby Lipscani remains to give some of the flavor of what was lost, and some older buildings survive even in small pockets within the general area of the Centru Civic itself. Many churches, such as the Sf. Nicolai-Mihai Vodă Church, were moved rather than demolished, and the nearby Antim Monastery remains largely intact, although minus its eastern wing. Immediately adjacent to the Centru Civic, just off of Unirii Square, is the Metropolitan Hill (Dealul Metropoliei) with the Patriarchal Cathedral and Palace, seat of patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church.