NYT Living in 050611

LIVING IN | TRIBECA The Land of the $800 Stroller By JOHN FREEMAN GILL Published: May 6, 2011 Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times A jungle gym at the new playground on Pier 25 provides a child-friendly vantage point on TriBeCa, which has added an average of more than 100 families a year since 2000. (The high-rise in the background is in Battery Park City.) On Sept. 11, 2001, TriBeCa, the Lower Manhattan loft district two blocks north of the World Trade Center, shook. Much of the neighborhood saw one if not both hijacked airliners fly into the twin towers. Residents watched aghast as bodies and then the buildings themselves crashed to earth. Clouds of ash descended on the streets as if in some macabre snowstorm. “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 White Street as both home and studio. Soon she met Michael Hartnett, an English banker who lived down the street, on a blind date arranged by his real estate broker. The couple were married two years later. “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 London, during which Ms. Hartnett had a baby boy and became pregnant with a second one, the couple returned to TriBeCa in 2004, paying $2.75 million for a two-bedroom two-bath co-op loft on Hudson Street, in a converted Beaux Arts office building. 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 London she had felt isolated and lonely. But in her TriBeCa building she soon met an artist, Christine Sciulli, who had two boys around the same ages as her own. Ms. Sciulli introduced her to other mothers, most of them creative professionals, and before long the women had formed a “mama group” they called the Supper Club. Once a week for more than six years they met at one another’s lofts while their children charged around. “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. 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 West Street and the Hudson River. The southern boundary, which the community board puts at Murray Street, received a high-rise infusion of residential luxury in 2006 with the opening of 101 Warren Street, often called a downtown Time Warner Center. The Whole Foods in the base of the 35- story building has also provided a gleaming emporium of designer food to an area previously short of supermarkets. 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 101 Warren Street and 7 Hubert Street, brokers said. Ms. Mandel, the Corcoran executive, said that units in such buildings had been selling for $1,600 to $2,600 per square foot. Two Federal-style houses are on the market, with asking prices of $5.25 million and $6.5 million. 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 North Moore Street, began a phased reopening last November after a renovation. The new playground and synthetic turf field are attracting lots of visitors, and the rest of the pier’s facilities, including a climbing wall and mini-golf course, are to open soon. But for some who recall this new pier’s funky predecessor, with its hamburger stand and its mini-golf course made by an artist and children out of recycled garbage, there lingers the sense that something homegrown and unique to TriBeCa has been scrubbed away. “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 Lower Manhattan has roused residents and their representatives. Their feistiness has yielded results. By September 2012, the city plans to open the third new primary school in four years. Students who live west of Church Street are zoned for Public School 234 on Greenwich Street, which received a B on its most recent city progress report. But the school has been oversubscribed; some children in this zone have gone elsewhere. Public School 397 will move into the base of the new Frank Gehry tower on Spruce Street in September. It will serve kindergarten through second grade this year, expanding one grade per year until it reaches eighth grade. Intermediate School 289 on Warren Street is one option for Grades 6 through 8; it received a B on its report. The selective Stuyvesant High School is on Chambers Street. SAT averages last year were 674 in reading, 735 in math and 678 in writing, versus 439, 462 and 434 citywide. 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 West Side.

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