SoHo's architecture with a tenth of the people and twice the money. Cobbled streets, cast-iron warehouses and almost nothing to do, which is the appeal.
Another acronym
TRIangle BEow CAnal, coined in the 1970s by the same instinct that produced SoHo and DUMBO. The triangle is roughly Canal Street, Broadway and the Hudson, though the boundaries have crept as the name became valuable.
It was the city’s produce market — Washington Market, on the site now occupied by the Borough of Manhattan Community College — and a district of textile and food warehouses. Those warehouses are the neighbourhood: enormous cast-iron and brick buildings with loading bays, converted to lofts from the 1970s onward.
Why come
There is very little to do here in the sense of attractions, and that is the reason to walk it. It is the quietest part of Lower Manhattan, the streets are cobbled, the buildings are large and handsome, and there are no crowds at all.
White Street, Franklin Place, Staple Street with its skybridge, and Harrison Street are the ones to walk.
Duane Park, a small triangle that was the city’s second public park, was the centre of the butter, cheese and egg trade.
The Ghostbusters firehouse — Hook & Ladder 8 — is on North Moore at Varick and is a working fire station. Be respectful; the crew are on duty.
Eating and drinking
Tribeca has a dense concentration of expensive, very good restaurants and almost nothing cheap. Bubby’s for breakfast is the exception people default to.
The Odeon on West Broadway has been there since 1980 and is the neighbourhood’s institution, the one on the cover of Bright Lights, Big City.
The film festival
The Tribeca Festival, founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal explicitly to bring people back downtown after 11 September, runs in June across venues in the neighbourhood and beyond. Tickets go on sale in the spring and the outdoor screenings are free.
Around it
Battery Park City and the Hudson River esplanade are to the west, SoHo directly north across Canal, Chinatown to the east, and the 9/11 Memorial about ten minutes south.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.