The Land of the $800 Stroller
ON Sept. 11, 2001, TriBeCa, the Lower Manhattan loft district two blocks north of the
“After 9/11 there was a sense of paralysis in the neighborhood — of ‘Oh, my God, what has happened, and will it happen again, and is it safe to live here?’ ” recalled Barrie Mandel, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group who has lived and sold real estate in TriBeCa since the 1980s. But within a year, Ms. Mandel said, “with leadership from The Tribeca Trib,” the newspaper that has long helped make a community out of the neighborhood, “most people decided, one person at a time, ‘Yes, it could happen again,’ but they decided to stay and help merchants reopen their businesses, and help the neighborhood come back and revive.”
Revive it did, and long before the killing last week of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks, an act that has helped bring the neighborhood a kind of closure. Just four months shy of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, TriBeCa is thriving. Far from fleeing this district of high-ceilinged converted warehouses and picturesque Belgian-block streets, people have been moving to it in droves. Between 2000 and 2009 the population of the 75-block neighborhood swelled by more than a third, to 14,190, census data show. Residents are richer now, too, with a median household income of $136,000, nearly one-fifth higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than a decade ago.
“When we look back at the rebuilding efforts, it’s a real testimony to our community’s ability to persevere,” said Julie Menin, the chairwoman of Community Board 1. “We’ve been able to build many new schools, parks, playgrounds, ball fields and community centers.”
It is families, lots of them, that have driven growth. TriBeCa has added an average of more than 100 families a year since 2000, accelerating its decades-long shift from an off-the-grid artists’ enclave to the Land of the $800 Stroller.
Nicole Rosenthal Hartnett, a children’s portrait photographer, has had a foot in each of these TriBeCas. In 1999, she bought a loft on
“I’m an artist, and he was one of those new bankers moving into the neighborhood,” she said. “It was the two worlds meeting. He was my first suit.”
After a stint in
The 3,000-square-foot apartment was large enough for Ms. Hartnett’s photography as well as her family. “This loft is an old-school open space,” she said, “so I can still drop down a roll of paper and have a studio.”
Shortly after moving in, she found herself immersed in the casual, family-friendly atmosphere for which TriBeCa is known. In
“You’d end up with 20 kids, easily, running around your house — all boys — and your house would get trashed,” she said. But the friendships forged among the women were so strong that even after the children drifted apart, their mothers have continued to meet for a weekly craft-night gathering they call the Henhouse.
WHAT YOU’LL FIND
TriBeCa, an acronym for Triangle Below Canal Street, charms the eye at every turn. A vigorous campaign led to the designation of much of it as four historic districts in the early 1990s, and a southern extension of the protected streetscape area was added in 2002. Thus the neighborhood retains much of the unified architectural feel of the commercial and manufacturing district it once was.
For residents this means lofts with soaring windows and vast floor plates, sometimes punctuated with cast-iron columns. For pedestrians it means gracious marble and cast-iron Italianate commercial palaces on and near TriBeCa’s eastern boundary of Broadway, and stout red-brick warehouses with Romanesque Revival-style arches nearer its western border of
The southern boundary, which the community board puts at
WHAT YOU’LL PAY
Lofts are king, and the buildings where they are found fall into two broad categories: co-ops, typically converted in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and condos, most either developed during the wave of conversions that began in the 1990s or built from scratch.
Co-op prices have taken a hit since the financial crisis of 2008, falling to an average $1.8 million this year from the market’s peak of $2.3 million three years ago, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
Condos, by contrast, cost even more than before: an average $2.8 million, up from $2.6 million in 2008. Among the condos is a small subset of superluxury buildings like
Ruth Hardinger, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that 176 properties were for sale, mostly condos, and 80 for rent. A two-bedroom two-bath unit costs $4,800 to $13,500 a month.
WHAT TO DO
Pier 25, public parkland jutting into the river near
“It’s lost its organic feel,” said Ms. Hardinger, who has lived in the neighborhood since the 1970s. “And in its place it has swings and toys that are industrially produced.”
Bob Townley, a mainstay of the old pier who will run programming on the new one, noted that it will serve far more people than its forebear did. “People love the pier,” he said. “Old-timers like myself may have a harder time learning to love it, but it’s important to realize that the Hudson River Park Trust took older elements and replicated them; it’s the old elements revitalized.”
THE SCHOOLS
School crowding in
Students who live west of
Public School 397 will move into the base of the new Frank Gehry tower on
The selective
Last month, the city said that in the fall of 2012, some residents would be expected to send their children to school outside the community board boundaries. Ms. Menin, the board chief, said she would fight any such plan.
THE COMMUTE
The financial district is within walking distance. The 1, 2 and 3 subway lines run along the
THE HISTORY
Several of TriBeCa’s finest 19th-century commercial buildings stand around Duane Park, a serene triangle bought by the city from Trinity Church for $5 in 1795, according to “The Texture of Tribeca,” by Andrew Scott Dolkart, published by the Tribeca Community Association in 1989.
Copyright © 2011 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Photos should be credited as follows: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times.