The Artists Who Built Tribeca
& a brief history of the neighborhood's many reinventions
What better way to start the week than with a little history?
I’m working on a new (very NYC) project and am testing out some early bits and pieces here. Please share with fellow New Yorkers or history nerds (or both)! And let me know what you think of this magazine-like style.
If you’re interested in learning more about anything referenced in this piece, check the “full text” at the bottom for relevant links.
Full text for accessibility and easy reading:
Canal Street is rushing. Water sprays from its sides, flicking at the long, heavy hems of pedestrians’ dresses. Not far away, birds call out in the midday heat. Trees rustle. Children gather to play in the patches of shade cast by low, slant-roofed buildings.
The year is 1802. Canal Street is not really a street, but – as the modern name so aptly suggests – a canal. The small waterway, roughly 1.4 miles in length, serves mostly as a drainage ditch from the northeastern swampland of New York to the Hudson River. Partway along, the canal intercepts a wide road that serves as the area’s main thoroughfare of trade and travel. Here, the road becomes an arching stone bridge--built during the American Revolution–– which crosses the canal and allows undisrupted access to and from the southern ports of the island.
Today, that main thoroughfare is known as Broadway, and at the point where it crosses Canal Street, there is no arched stone bridge, but rather a collection of tourist-trap markets, fast food, and halal carts. Cheap t-shirts reading “New York Fucking City” and “I Survived My Trip to NYC” swing gently from open awnings. The air is thick with the scent of weed and charred meat. This cacophonic corner is the intersection of three neighborhoods. To the north, aesthetized, consumer-centric Soho. To the east, bustling Chinatown. And to the southwest, beyond the raucous crowds and infested air, a peaceful, historic oasis in the heart of downtown New York: TriBeCa.
On the heels of the industrial revolution in the United States, much of the pastoral farm-heavy landscape of NYC began to give way to development. This industrial boom accelerated even further after the opening of the Erie Canal, which first established the area south of Canal Street as the city's logical commercial center. Merchants built warehouses to store goods arriving from upstate and the western territories, manufacturers created plants and distribution centers, and Washington Market, established in 1812, became the neighborhood's central institution. The market complex, which occupied several blocks between West Street and Greenwich Street, served as the city's wholesale food distribution center. Around the market, neighborhood businesses took hold, including textile importers, coffee roasters, spice merchants, and more.
It was a time of great excitement and prosperity for the once-quite neighborhood. Tribeca seemed to many the heart of the city, the neighborhood around which all else orbited. But things in New York, and in the United States at large, were changing quickly. Old Tribeca would not last. The neighborhood’s decline began in the 1920s and accelerated after World War II, when improved transportation and changing business practices drew commerce away from lower Manhattan. The construction of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels in 1927 shifted trucking and trade routes, and Washington Market, which had been relocated several times to accommodate development, eventually made a final move to the Bronx.
After the smoke from these many changes cleared, much of Tribeca’s commercial spaces were left empty. The large lofts and roomy buildings that had been built to house manufacturing operations proved difficult to adapt to new uses. Property values dropped, and the neighborhood entered what urban planners call a period of disinvestment.
But it didn’t take long for people to find promise in the suddenly cheap area. In the mid-1950s and early 60s, artists and creators began flocking to NYC and taking up residence – often illegally due to zoning restrictions– in Tribeca’s abandoned warehouses. With just a few makeshift additions, the large, affordable spaces that had once stored cotton and coffee became ideal creative studios and living abodes. These improvised homes boasted high ceilings and large windows that were becoming increasingly rare in the rest of the city. Wary of the precarity of their situations, residents formed the Artist Tenants Association in 1961 and convinced Mayor Robert Wagner to allow artists to live in industrial buildings if they proved their artist status and displayed "Artist in Residence" signs. Tribeca remained a mixed district of commercial operations, empty buildings, and these newly coined “artists' lofts”. The neighborhood’s unique character began to form; quieter than SoHo to the north but more residential than the Financial District to the south.
By the mid-1970s, however, these affordable lofts began to attract the attention of wealthier city residents, and landlords started evicting the artists who had renovated the spaces at their own expense. Recognizing the threat they were under, artists once again joined together in protest, successfully lobbying for the 1982 Loft Law. This legislation protected tenants from unreasonable evictions and rent increases while requiring landlords to bring buildings up to residential code, making rent increases contingent on these improvements, and legitimizing the Tribeca loft living that continues today.
Despite these hard-fought battles, by the nineties, many of the artists who had established the neighborhood's residential character still found themselves displaced by (now legally) rising rents. The loft spaces they had created became desirable addresses for Wall Street executives, media figures, and celebrities who wasted no time making the neighborhood their own. In 1990, Robert De Niro moved into a building on Greenwich Street and opened the Tribeca Grill just a few blocks away, after which other upscale restaurants followed. The neighborhood's transformation from industrial district to luxury residential area was largely complete by the end of the decade.
And then, tragedy. The attacks of September 11th devastated the city. Tribeca’s proximity to the World Trade Center left it highly vulnerable to dust, debris, and other dangers for many weeks following 9/11. Residents evacuated, and some buildings remained uninhabitable for months at a time. The neighborhood’s seemingly “untouchable” veneer of wealth and safety was shattered. When the dust (literal and figurative) of 9/11 settled and residents began their hesitant return to the city, certain locals took up the charge of restoration. The Tribeca Film Festival, launched by De Niro in 2002, was part of this movement, conceived as a way to revitalize the area and restore its cultural identity.
Today's Tribeca bears little tangible resemblance to the sprawling farms or bustling markets that once occupied this land. The neighborhood has become one of Manhattan's most expensive residential areas, home to celebrities, financiers, and other wealthy city folk. In Tribeca, it’s a challenge to find dinner under 25$, and nearly impossible to find an affordable place to live. The lucky ones do. Or they don’t care if it’s affordable.
But, there are still some artists and creatives making their homes in Tribeca. There are still echoes of the productive, industrial, center-of-the-city neighborhood from many years past. The lofts of the ’60s and ’70s, though mostly renovated and modernized today, still bear signs of their earliest functionality: a company name on the side of a building, original brick walls, indoor metal beamwork, deserted shaftways.
Tribeca’s true history lives not in any single era, but in the accumulation of all its identities, each built upon the foundation of what came before, each one believing it might be the last.