Still Surviving After All These Years
By JENNIFER BLEYER | February 18, 2007
SOHO SHED ITS PERSONALITY AS A GRITTY industrial neighborhood inhabited primarily by artists years ago, but a few redoubts of the old SoHo remain. A handful of artists who settled the neighborhood back in the 1970’s are still here: in the spacious, sunny lofts they bought for a song, or the rent-stabilized apartments they have managed to hang onto. Though not necessarily famous by the art world’s standards, they continue to live and work in the same neighborhood in which they came of age creatively.
One is Sal Lindsay, a 4-foot-11-inch-tall, 69-year-old, talkative firecracker, who moved to SoHo in 1971. Her loft, which occupies the entire 12th floor of a building on lower Broadway, is carved into a maze delineated by old bookshelves, antique bureaus and slabs of stained glass that she salvaged from a church in Turtle Creek, Pa. To the left as you enter is her studio, with tubes of oil paint lined up on a table and bright, gauzy portraits on the walls.
She still has a sense of ownership of the streets. “Those of us who’ve been here since the beginning still think of it as our neighborhood, our lofts,” she said the other day as she sipped English tea at her kitchen table.
Though most of her friends don’t live in SoHo anymore, a few do. She belongs to a painting group that includes two other longtime SoHo artists, and they gather monthly at one or another’s studio to drink wine and assess work. Sometimes they talk about the neighborhood and its old bohemianism.
“Those of us who’ve been here since the beginning still think of it as our neighborhood.”
“When Bloomingdale’s opened up across the street,” Ms. Lindsay said with a laugh, “I said the neighborhood is going to the dogs.”
Another SoHo pioneer is Dominick Di Meo, a self-acknowledged recluse who makes complicated, silvery mixed-media reliefs and sculptures, often imprinted with a repeated image of a face with its mouth agape. He came to SoHo in 1974, but he did not immediately love the neighborhood.
“It’s nicer now that most of the artists have left,” he said. “Artists are prima donnas, you know.”
TriBeCa Follows SoHo, Gingerly
By LAURIE JOHNSTON | August 25, 1977
“TRIBECA ISN’T SOHO, BUT YOU’LL NOTICE there are fixture fees for even those ‘loftments,’” said the apartment-hunting young artist, who was really not speaking in tongues. “From what I’ve seen, though, a lot of places down here will never get a C. of O. to qualify for a J-51 from the city.”
That’s the way they talk these days in TriBeCa—the unofficial name for the Triangle Below Canal Street (pronounced Try-beeka by logic, Try-becka by custom, and as rarely as possible by many residents, who call it “a real-estate word” and prefer to say that they live “downtown”).
The Manhattan race for space, which opened up the SoHo loft area south of Houston Street for artists’ living—and soon overpriced it for most of them—is now transforming TriBeCa, the 40-square-block area that begins somewhat south of Greenwich Village and extends nearly to the World Trade Center. Unlike SoHo, TriBeCa’s newly legalized conversion for living is not limited to artists.
Philippe Petit, the mime, lives in a building that is dominated by the World Trade Center towers that Mr. Petit high wire-walked between in 1974. David Forman, a rock singer-songwriter, is another tenant there. TriBeCa’s “loft people” also include Twyla Tharp and Kel Takei, dancer-choreographers; Betsey Johnson and Rosanna Polizzotto, fashion designers; and James DeWoody, painter, and his wife, Beth Rudin DeWoody, a filmmaker and daughter of Lewis Rudin, the real estate executive.
The area was New York’s Les Halles for more than a century. It was a commodity market and a cornucopia of fresh food and exotic delicacies. Now, however, the rush is on to convert TriBeCa’s sound-but-seedy commercial buildings into residential-priced rental lofts or cooperative apartments.
“It still feels like Little Old New York but not for long,” said Jim Moore, a partner in the mime studio where Mr. Petit rents part of the living space. The 10-story building has been sold to a real estate broker who wants the occupants, now paying $325 to $400 in commercial rent, to buy their 2,100-square-foot as a cooperative at $45,000 each. He and Mr. Petit and the others are looking, not very optimistically, for a building they could still get for a down payment of $10,000 each.
“A lot of new tenants are pretty naïve,” said Amalie Rothschild, a filmmaker and member of Community Board 1. “They don’t even know they’re being exploited until it’s pointed out to them.” Barry Chusid, partner and co-loftholder with Rosanna Polizzotto in a business called Garbo Garbs, put it more bluntly.
“These people,” he said, “come down here looking for living lofts and wearing a sign that says, ‘Hi! I’m your newest sucker. Take me for a ride.’”
Residential Real Estate—TriBeCa Is the Priciest Neighborhood
By DENNIS HEVESI | May 17, 2002
A ZIP-CODE BY ZIP-CODE ANALYSIS OF THE New York real estate market shows that TriBeCa, with its apartments converted from expansive lofts, was the highest priced residential neighborhood in Manhattan last year. Apartments there were on average about 50 percent more expensive than those in the neighborhood that might have seemed like the obvious choice, the Upper East Side.
While apartments in TriBeCa were the most expensive, the highest average price per square foot remained on the Upper East Side, in the 10021 ZIP code, where it was $856.
The survey, conducted by Jonathan Miller, president of the Miller Samuel appraisal company, looked at the co-op and condominium market in 35 of Manhattan’s 43 ZIP codes through a total of 7,787 closed transactions, based primarily on public records and reports from managing agents. For the entire borough, the study found, the average sales price was $785,753.
In TriBeCa, the average price was $1,638,811, 53 percent higher than the $1,070,897 average price on the Upper East Side.
What a Difference 38 Years Makes
By DAN SHAW | October 14, 2007
The Meatpacking District has become a popular nightlife destination.
IN 1969, WHEN VINCENT INCONIGLIOS MOVED to a loft on Gansevoort Street in the meatpacking district, it was a no man’s land. “People did not believe you when you told them where you lived,” he said.
Now, 38 years later, he cannot believe that his once-obscure neighborhood is a destination. He is dumbstruck by charter buses that deposit tourists to shop at the designer boutiques and dine at the trendy restaurants. Like other artists of his generation, Mr. Inconiglios, 61, had ventured into the grimy meatpacking district in search of cheap studio space. “Originally, there were five of us who shared a floor,” he recalled. “We paid $50 apiece.”
Mr. Inconiglios now has two floors, each about 2,000 square feet. He won’t say how much rent he pays now, but he considers it something of a miracle that he has managed to hold on to his lease for all these years.
The lofts were raw, and the upgrades were often improvisational, like a dropped ceiling made from old canvases a former tenant left behind. The utilitarian metal shower stall in Mr. Inconiglios’s bathroom is a reminder that the term “luxury loft” used to be an oxymoron. Two or three decades ago, the neighborhood was defined by something quite different.
“You could smell this neighborhood,” he said. “You could feel the air. You’d walk down the street and smell pickles. That Italian restaurant down the block was a pickle factory. An importer of Spanish melons was downstairs, and he would leave the spotted ones they couldn’t sell out on the street, and I’d take them home. And there were big barrels of bones on the street because there was meat everywhere and men in bloody white coats.” He knew how to spot potential trouble: “If you saw a group of guys in white coats and sneakers, you knew they were not butchers but thieves because the butchers always wore heavy boots.”
Greenwich Village Attracts Investors
By LEE E. COOPER | October 31, 1940
Pedestrians pass outdoor diners at a corner restaura
nt at West Fourth and Perry Streets, in the West Village in 2007.
GREENWICH VILLAGE, A RATHER INACTIVE neighborhood during the worst years of the Depression, is again attracting investors. Two sales in that colorful old residential section of Manhattan emphasized the attention being paid to buying opportunities there.
Both of the transactions involved corner apartment groups on West Tenth Street in the Village. An investing client of Charles R. Faruolo bought through the Duross Company the five five-story tenements at the northwest corner of Hudson and West Tenth Streets, in the first change of ownership of the property since 1889.
The buildings accommodate 82 families and 8 retail firms, and are reported fully rented, bringing in about $20,000 annually. The assessed valuation is $156,000, of which $98,000 is on the land. The sale was made subject to a first mortgage of $60,000 held by the Bank for Savings. The seller was the estate of Frank E. Schaeffer, who was a well-known builder in his day and who erected the houses there 51 years ago.
The two six-story apartment houses at 211-15 West Tenth Street, at the corner of Bleecker Street, were purchased by the Georgecrest Estates Corporation from the Exposition Realty Company. The buildings contain 44 apartments and 7 stores. The location is one block from Sheridan Square, in the heart of the Village, and within a stone’s throw of the former Schaeffer property. The buyers paid cash above a first mortgage of $150,000.
“Village” Named A Landmark
By MAURICE CARROLL | April 30, 1969
WITH A QUOTATION FROM HENRY JAMES ON the charm of the neighborhood, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Greenwich Village as a historic district yesterday.
“It has,” Mr. James wrote in “Washington Square,” “a kind of established repose … a riper, richer, more honorable look … the look of having had something of a history.”
To help maintain that comfortable look, the commission will have to approve building owners’ exterior alteration plans in an area north and west of Washington Square. “The Landmarks Preservation Commission,” said Harmon H. Goldstone, chairman, “will now be responsible for guiding the hand of hundreds of property owners. Each exterior alteration or addition—no matter how trivial in itself—can just as easily be made an asset to the community instead of a detriment.”
Next Stop, the West Village
By GERRY SHANAHAN | September 23, 2007
LIKE ANY OTHER REAL NEW YORKER, I HATE to leave the apartment. But I must, of course, to go to the job, restock the cupboards and walk the dogs.
Once I’m out, though, it’s not that bad, because I step out onto Perry Street in the West Village, on the block between Bleecker and West Fourth Streets, which the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission described as “a delightful and interesting street” when it designated the Greenwich Village Historic District in 1969 and protected more than 2,000 historically significant buildings. This clean, tree-lined stretch of Perry is still delightful and interesting and, thanks to the commission, still residential, intimate and human in scale.
Over at No. 66, a stately Italianate brownstone from 1866, another busload of tourists is taking turns posing for pictures as they sit on the high stoop. They’re on the daily “Sex and the City” Tour ($37 each), and these are the very steps that Carrie Bradshaw ran up and down at her apartment, which on the show was supposed to be in the East 70’s.
I mention this not because Villagers like to show off, which we do, or because our geography is a fetish, which it is, but to illustrate why we Villagers are the hardest working tribe in New York.
“Yo,” I say as I pass them, “You know this house is from the 1800’s, and so are most of the others on the street. If you like No. 66, check out the brownstone at No. 70, the best on the block, French Second Empire. Look over there—there’s a Beaux-Arts, and over there, a bit of Romanesque Revival.”
They appear unimpressed, but I’ve just performed one of the labors that come with being a Villager: imparting Village lore to everyone and anyone.
A friend walking with me on, say, Bedford Street, will hear, “That’s the oldest house in the Village that’s still standing, from 1799” (No. 77). On Grove Street, it’s “They say John Wilkes Booth plotted Lincoln’s assassination here” (No. 45). On Bank Street, it’s “Here’s where Lauren Bacall lived when she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village 1942” (No. 75).
Small-town chauvinism? Fact, or myth and exaggeration? In the Village, we mix it all together and call it history. If you want to be here, be prepared to take on the unpaid job of learning it, repeating it, and along with the buildings, preserving it. It falls to us Old Villagers to keep the neighborhood’s reputation alive, handing down the oral history so the Village will forever be remembered as the one true American artistic and intellectual bohemia, the place from which every American enlightenment sprung: Beatniks, sexual freedom, Abstract Expressionism, gay lib, women’s lib, folk music, counterculturalism and so on.
Picketing one another is also a job that regularly falls to the guardians of ZIP code 10014. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation led the protests at Julian Schnabel’s old home at 360 West 11th, which is just past where the 1969 landmark district ends. Mr. Schnabel had decided to cash in on this decade’s real estate market by adding an 11-story condo tower. It is Pepto-Bismol pink. The historic society moved quickly to extend the landmark district and put the kibosh on a Miami-on-Hudson, which I support, of course.
The impetus for residential towers here was the pair of 16-story green-glass ones on Perry at West Street designed by Richard Meier. If you live in the towers, you can get room service. After a hard day of picketing and preserving, there is no more delightful and interesting place around to have a drink than at Perry Street.
Quite a few times, I’ve secretly wished that I lived in that tower. Please, please don’t tell the historic society I said that.
Chinatown Leaps Into Little Italy
By FRED FERRETTI | July 13, 1980
WHEN FORMAL FUNERALS WIND SLOWLY through the narrow streets of Little Italy these days, with the trumpets and drums of the Bacigalupo Funeral Home on Mulberry Street mournfully playing “Rock of Ages,” more likely than not the cars in procession are filled with Chinese. Perhaps nothing else is quite so symbolic of what that patch of Lower Manhattan called Little Italy has become.
It may be Little Italy to city planners and to the few Italian-Americans for whom it is still home, and the unbroken ranks of restaurants along Mulberry may present a facade that is solidly Italian, but Little Italy is in fact rapidly disappearing as New York’s historic Italian enclave. Many of the Italians have now moved to the suburbs or to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And the Chinese are rapidly buying in.
One realtor estimated recently that within the 37 square blocks of Little Italy, Chinese own 70 percent of the buildings.
The newcomers are not from Canton, the origin of the early Chinese arrivals, but from the north, from Shanghai mostly, and from Taiwan. It is these newcomers, with fresh money, who have made the Chinatown-Little Italy area an investment boomtown.
One realtor, John Zaccaro, estimated recently that within the 37 square blocks of Little Italy, Chinese own 70 percent of the buildings.
They are buying those buildings for enormous prices with money that has lately come from Taiwan and Macao. The relatively new Golden Pacific National Bank on Canal Street is a reportedly a haven for Taiwan funds. At least one building in Chinatown, the glass-faced square at Mott and Chatham Square, reportedly was built with gambling proceeds from Macao’s casinos and dog tracks.
Says Mr. Bastiano, “The attitude here was, the buyers would say, ‘I’ll buy anything’; the seller would say, ‘Whatever you offer, I’ll take.’ And it usually was a lot more than the market value.”
Plans to Rebuild Chinatown And Two Other Slums Started
By MILTON M. LEVENSON | May 25, 1950
THE FIRST ACTUAL STEPS TOWARD REBUILDing three major slum areas in the city are being taken. Within fi
ve years Chinatown is to be changed from a quaint city landmark of 25,000 cramped residents into a sunlit, park-filled area retaining aspects of Chinese life such as “pagoda-touched” architecture, according to proposals made by State Housing Commissioner Herman T. Stichman. Three projected housing projects are expected to cost $20 million.
At a meeting in the Chinese Public School at 64 Mott Street, Mr. Stichman told representatives of Chinatown that its “living conditions are a reproach to the city.” He cited the lack of private baths in 1,784 apartments out of 2,502.
He promised every aid in keeping Chinese characteristics in the new “village.” But he declared also that others than Chinese would live in the new houses because discrimination would not be permitted.
Where All Sojourners Can Feel Hua
By JENNIFER 8. LEE | January 27, 2006
Shops along Broadway in Chinatown.
THERE IS NO CONSISTENT NAME FOR “CHINA-town” in Chinese. Newspapers use one name, popular speech uses others. At the Canal Street subway station on Broadway the chosen translation is delicately pixeled together from colorful tiles: “huabu.” Hua means “Chinese,” but with a sense that transcends geography and has nothing to do with the nation of China. Bu means “place” or “town.”
For all the trips my family took to Chinatown when I was growing up, I never knew that Chinatown was known as huabu until I saw the characters after the station renovation. Hua is the distilled essence of being Chinese, free of fissures caused by wars and colonization. You can be hua even if you hold a passport from Singapore, the United States or Peru. You can be hua even if you have never set foot in China and don’t speak a word of Chinese.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 65