Tribeca
Tribeca, originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" is bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Chambers Street. By the 2010s, a common marketing tactic was to extend Tribeca's southern boundary to either Vesey or Murray Streets to increase the appeal of property listings.
The neighborhood began as farmland, then was a residential neighborhood in the early 19th century, before becoming a mercantile area centered on produce, dry goods, and textiles, and then transitioning to artists and then actors, models, entrepreneurs, and other celebrities. The neighborhood is home to the Tribeca Festival, which was created in response to the September 11 attacks, to reinvigorate the neighborhood and downtown after the destruction caused by the terrorist attacks.
Tribeca is part of Manhattan Community District 1, and its primary ZIP Codes are 10007 and 10013. It is patrolled by the 1st Precinct of the New York City Police Department.
Name
Tribeca is one of a number of neighborhoods in New York City whose names are syllabic abbreviations or acronyms, including SoHo, NoHo, Nolita, NoMad, DUMBO, and BoCoCa, the last of which is actually a collection of neighborhoods.The name "Tribeca" was coined in the early 1970s and originally applied to the narrower area bounded by Broadway and Canal, Lispenard, and Church Streets, which appears to be a triangle on city planning maps. Residents of this area formed the TriBeCa Artists' Co-op in filing legal documents connected to a 1973 zoning dispute. An April 1976 article in The New York Times described that residents had used such names as "Lo Cal" and "So So" for the neighborhood, and that the City Planning Commission had established the name and that it covered "Canal Street on the north, Barclay Street on the south, West Street, and Broadway on the east". According to a local historian, the name had been misconstrued by the newspaper reporter as applying to a much larger area, which is how it came to be the name of the current neighborhood.
History
Early history
The area now known as Tribeca was farmed by Dutch settlers to New Amsterdam, prominently Roeleff Jansen and his wife Anneke Jans who later married Everardus Bogardus. The land stayed with the family until 1670 when the deed was signed over to Col. Francis Lovelace. In 1674 the Dutch took possession of the area until the English reclaimed the land a year later. In 1674, representing the Duke of York, Governor Andros took possession of the land.Tribeca was later part of the large tract of land given to Trinity Church by Queen Anne in 1705. In 1807, the church built St. John's Chapel on Varick Street and then laid out St. John's Park, bounded by Laight Street, Varick Street, Ericsson Place, and Hudson Street. The church also built Hudson Square, a development of brick houses that surrounded the park, which would become the model for Gramercy Park. The area was among the first residential neighborhoods developed in New York City beyond the city's colonial boundaries, and remained primarily residential until the 1840s.
Several streets in the area are named after Anthony Lispenard Bleecker and the Lispenard family. Beach Street was created in the late 18th century and was the first street on or adjacent to the farm of Anthony Lispenard Bleecker, which was just south of what is now Canal Street; the name of the street is a corruption of the name of Paul Bache, a son-in-law of Anthony Lispenard. Lispenard Street in Tribeca is named for the Lispenard family, and Bleecker Street in NoHo was named for Anthony Lispenard Bleecker.
Commercial and industrial development
During the 1840s and then continuing after the American Civil War, shipping in New York City – which then consisted only of Manhattan – shifted in large part from the East River and the area around South Street to the Hudson River, where the longer piers could more easily handle the larger ships which were then coming into use. In addition, the dredging of the sand bars which lay across the entrance to New York Harbor from the Atlantic Ocean made it easier for ships to navigate to the piers on the Hudson, rather than use the "back door" via the East River to the piers there. Later, the Hudson River piers also received freight via railroad cars ferried across the river from New Jersey.File:Radio Row-Berenice Abbott.jpg|thumb|"Radio Row", seen here in 1934, was displaced by the building of the World Trade Center.
The increased shipping encouraged the expansion of the Washington Market – a wholesale produce market that opened in 1813 as "Bear Market" – from the original market buildings to buildings throughout its neighborhood, taking over houses and warehouses to use for the storage of produce, including butter, cheese, and eggs. In the mid-19th century, the neighborhood was the center of the dry goods and textile industries in the city, and St. John's Park was turned into a freight depot. Later, the area also featured fireworks outlets, pets stores, radios – which were clustered in a district that was displaced by the building of the World Trade Center – sporting goods, shoes, and church supplies. By the mid-19th century, the area transformed into a commercial center, with large numbers of store and loft buildings constructed along Broadway in the 1850s and 1860s.
Development in the area was further spurred by New York City Subway construction, namely the extension of the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line, which opened for service in 1918, and the accompanying extension of Seventh Avenue and the widening of Varick Street during subway construction in 1914, both of resulted in better access to the area for vehicles and for subway riders. The area was also served by the IRT Ninth Avenue Line, an elevated train line on Greenwich Street demolished in 1940.
After the construction of the Holland Tunnel from 1920 to 1927 and the transition of freight shipping from ships and railroads to trucks, the truck traffic generated by the market and other businesses caused considerable congestion in the area. This provoked the building between 1929 and 1951 of the Miller Highway, an elevated roadway that came to be called the West Side Highway, the purpose of which was to handle through automobile traffic, which thus did not have to deal with the truck congestion at street level. Because of a policy of "deferred maintenance", the elevated structure began to fall apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the highway was shut down in 1973. The roadway project planned to replace it, called Westway, was fought by neighborhood activists, and was eventually killed by environmental concerns. Instead, West Street was rebuilt to handle through traffic.
Redevelopment
By the 1960s, Tribeca's industrial base had all but vanished, and the produce market moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx in the 1960s. The city put an urban renewal plan into effect, which involved the demolition of many old buildings, with the intent of building high-rise residential towers, office buildings, and schools. Some of these were constructed, including Independence Plaza in 1975 on Washington Street, the Borough of Manhattan Community College in 1980, and Washington Market Park in 1981. Some warehouse buildings were converted to residential use, and lofts began to be utilized by artists, who lived and worked in their spaces, a model which had been pioneered in nearby SoHo. In the early 1970s, a couple of years after artists in SoHo were able to legalize their live/work situation, artist and resident organizations in the area to the south, then known as Washington Market or the Lower West Side, sought to gain similar zoning status for their neighborhood. One of the neighborhood groups called themselves the "Triangle Below Canal Block Association", and, as activists had done in SoHo, shortened the group's name to the Tribeca Block Association. The Tribeca name came to be applied to the area south of Canal Street, between Broadway and West Street, extending south to – as variously defined – Chambers, Vesey, or Murray Street.In 1996, the Tribeca Open Artist Studio Tour was founded as a non-profit, artist-run organization with the mission to empower the working artists of Tribeca while providing an educational opportunity for the public. For 15 years, the annual free walking tour through artist studios in Tribeca has allowed people to get a unique glimpse into the lives of Tribeca's best creative talent. Tribeca suffered both physically and financially after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but government grants and incentives helped the area rebound fairly quickly. The Tribeca Film Festival was established to help contribute to the long-term recovery of lower Manhattan after 9/11. The festival also celebrates New York City as a major filmmaking center. The mission of the film festival is "to enable the international film community and the general public to experience the power of film by redefining the film festival experience." Tribeca is a popular filming location for movies and television shows.
By the early 21st century, Tribeca became one of Manhattan's most fashionable and desirable neighborhoods, well known for its celebrity residents. Its streets teem with art galleries, boutique shops, restaurants, and bars. In 2006, Forbes magazine ranked its 10013 zip code as New York City's most expensive. Tribeca was the safest neighborhood in New York City, according to NYPD and CompStat statistics. In the 2010s, several skyscrapers were completed, including 30 Park Place, 56 Leonard Street, and 111 Murray Street.
Demographics
For census purposes, the New York City government classifies Tribeca as part of a larger neighborhood tabulation area called SoHo-TriBeCa-Civic Center-Little Italy. Based on data from the 2010 United States census, the population of SoHo-TriBeCa-Civic Center-Little Italy was 42,742, a change of 5,985 from the 36,757 counted in 2000. Covering an area of, the neighborhood had a population density of. The racial makeup of the neighborhood was 66.1% White, 2.2% African American, 0.1% Native American, 22.2% Asian, 0% Pacific Islander, 0.4% from other races, and 2.6% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 6.5% of the population.The entirety of Community District 1, which comprises Tribeca and other Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, had 63,383 inhabitants as of NYC Health's Community Health Profile, with an average life expectancy of 85.8 years. This is higher than the median life expectancy of 81.2 for all New York City neighborhoods. Most inhabitants are young to middle-aged adults: half are between the ages of 25–44, while 14% are between 0–17, and 18% between 45 and 64. The ratio of college-aged and elderly residents was lower, at 11% and 7%, respectively.
the median household income in Community Districts 1 and 2 was $144,878. In 2018, an estimated 9% of Tribeca and Lower Manhattan residents lived in poverty, compared to 14% in all of Manhattan and 20% in all of New York City. One in twenty-five residents were unemployed, compared to 7% in Manhattan and 9% in New York City. Rent burden, or the percentage of residents who have difficulty paying their rent, is 38% in Tribeca and Lower Manhattan, compared to the boroughwide and citywide rates of 45% and 51%, respectively. Based on this calculation, as of 2018 Tribeca and Lower Manhattan are considered high-income relative to the rest of the city and not gentrifying.