A wholesalefood district in the past with old trade buildings gradually converted into a modern area with upper class apartments and famous restaurants.
Tribeca at night
The district’s name ‘Tribeca’ is a semiotic composition, invented in the mid-1970s by real-estate brokers, who considered that the name is more adequate to the trendiness of the neighborhood, than its original name, Washington Market.
Initially, Washington Market was a huge hall next to the river, south of Chambers Street. The hall was demolished in 1968, as part of the plan for the World Trade Center. At that time, it was considered that most wholesalers already left the cramped streets of the area to move to the Bronx, in the modern Hunts Point complex.
For the meantime, the blocks bordering Broadway were the headquarters of the biggest textile industry in the United States. In the 1960s, just as the food wholesalers, the textile dealers gradually disappeared as most of their workshops located on Worth Streets were demolished. The former industry is now limited to some smaller fabric stores.
For over a decade, the entire area was like a ghost town, until such artists as Richard Serra started to use the long deserted warehouses as studios to create canvases and large-scale sculptures. During the art-market sudden increase in the late 1980s, when the neighboring Soho quickly became chic, buyers rushed for reasonably priced warehouses in Tribeca. In time, the living space in the area achieved the same price and status as the Soho’s.
The fact that such high-profile persons, as Mariah Carey, Kirsten Dunst, novelist Patrick McGrath and Gwyneth Paltrow have purchased apartments in the area, also have a certain class to the area. One of the biggest names of the area is Robert De Niro, who had a major contribution in founding the Tribeca Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Center, a top-notch building for editors, directors and producers.
[ Photo, courtesy of Tom Giebel ]