Tribeca in New York was once the city's wholesale market for vegetables, fabric and dry goods. Today the warehouses are residential buildings, the cobblestones remain, and four protected historic districts keep the blocks intact. A portrait of the neighbourhood that got its name from a misreading.
Tribeca in New York is an abbreviation of Triangle Below Canal, the triangle below Canal Street – even though the area is, in practice, a quadrilateral between Canal Street, West Street, Broadway and Chambers Street. The name was coined in the early 1970s and was first used for a significantly smaller area. Residents there formed the TriBeCa Artists' Co-op in connection with a zoning battle in 1973, and according to a local historian, it was when a reporter at The New York Times misunderstood the boundaries in 1976 that the name came to apply to the entire current neighbourhood.
It is a fitting beginning for a neighbourhood that has changed identity several times: farmland, early residential area, trading district, artists' colony and today one of Manhattan's most expensive addresses.
From Dutch farm to the city's pantry
The land was farmed by Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam; Roeleff Jansen received his land grant in 1636. In 1705, the area became part of the large tract of land that Queen Anne granted to Trinity Church. In 1807, the church built St. John's Chapel on Varick Street and laid out St. John's Park, surrounded by brick houses that later became the model for Gramercy Park. Tribeca was one of the first residential areas to be built outside the city's colonial boundaries and remained mostly residential until the 1840s.
Then trade took over. The blocks were filled with warehouses for vegetables, dry goods and textiles, and Washington Market became the city's most important wholesale market for fruit and vegetables, with its heyday between 1880 and 1910. In the 1960s, the wholesale trade moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx and the city demolished the market halls. The warehouses remained standing – large, bright and cheap – and the artists moved in.
Four historic districts preserve the streetscape
What makes Tribeca so uniform today is early preservation work. A committee was formed in 1984 to protect the area, and when an eleven-storey tower was planned on top of a cast-iron building at 55 White Street, construction was halted following a hearing in 1987. The Landmarks Preservation Commission then divided the neighbourhood into four historic districts: Tribeca West in 1991, and Tribeca South, East and North in 1992.
Tribeca West comprised 17 blocks and around 220 buildings at the time of the decision – warehouses, factories and office buildings, most of them from 1860 to 1910. Here stands the former New York Mercantile Exchange and the Powell Building, a Beaux-Arts style office building designed by Carrère and Hastings and built in 1890. 401 Greenwich Street is cited as the location where modern bowling was born.
The parks – one for five dollars, one that happened instead of a car park
Duane Park is a small triangular park between Hudson Street and two branches of Duane Street. The city bought the land from Trinity Church in 1795 for five dollars, and the park was designed by Calvert Vaux, one of Central Park's architects. It is surrounded by ornate 19th-century loft buildings and is counted among the city's oldest public parks.
Washington Market Park, between Greenwich Street, Chambers Street and West Street, has a different history. In the late 1970s, the city wanted to turn a disused landfill into a municipal car park. Residents protested and got a park instead, which opened in April 1983 and was named after the demolished market. It covers just over 6,500 square metres, with allotments and a large playground, and is run by a non-profit association whose board is elected by the neighbours.
The festival that was meant to revive downtown
After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Lower Manhattan lost visitors and life. Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff responded with a film festival. The first one, planned in 120 days with the help of more than 1,300 volunteers, opened on 8 May 2002. Today it is called the Tribeca Festival – until 2020 the Tribeca Film Festival – and it shows over 600 screenings annually for around 150,000 visitors every spring, with film, TV series, music, games and art.
56 Leonard – the houses stacked against the sky
The neighbourhood's low-rise silhouette is broken by 56 Leonard Street, a 250-metre-tall residential tower with 57 storeys that was completed in 2017. It was designed by the Swiss Pritzker Prize winners Herzog & de Meuron, who describe it as "houses stacked in the sky" – each floor shifted relative to the one below, which has earned it the nickname Jenga. It is Tribeca's tallest building. In February 2023, a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, related to his Cloud Gate in Chicago, was unveiled at its base, following four years of work on site.
How to see Tribeca
Tribeca is a neighbourhood to walk through rather than tick off. Start at Duane Park, walk up Hudson Street towards what was St. John's Park, turn down through Greenwich Street and Franklin Street, where the loading docks and cast-iron façades are at their densest, and finish by the river. It's the wide pavements, the low buildings and the relative calm that set Tribeca apart from its neighbours SoHo and the Financial District.
Neighbourhoods, buildings and market data can be found in VERA PI's guide to New York City and on the overview for the state of New York. More city guides can be found among Metro Mode's destinations.
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