New York Has No Secret Spots
Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007
I thought no one else thought about living by the seaport
Many months ago I was wandering down by the South Street Seaport, wondering if it was worth seeing the Bodies Exhibition and deciding, again, it was too weird, when I had a wonderful daydream that made me think I could live in Manhattan indefinitely.
It was ten or so years from now. I had a family, a baby. We’d just moved into a huge apartment in a red brick building with high ceilings and enough floor space to have a ping-pong table with plenty of room for aggressive baseline rallies. The building used to be a warehouse of some sort, formerly home to something related to the fish market, or maybe the bottom floor was still a warehouse where the vendors of touristy items stored their wares overnight. You could see the mast of the seaport’s tallest ship above the FDR from the glass-paned windows.
My kid would grow up swimming in the river, which would be clean enough by that time that you could do things like that without showering immediately afterwards. He’d have a bike or a skateboard, because when he wanted to see his friends he’d have a trek to make to get to Manhattan proper. Or so I envisioned.
But I should have known, when the fish market closed, that things down there were in serious flux.
Turns out, my kid will have only to step around the corner to the cobblestone side street to find enough kids to play a game of stickball – with subs. But wait, no, because there will be traffic on those wide old streets, because all those kids will have parents who have cars and Wall Street bonuses and gyms in their buildings and roof terraces and walk-in refrigerators for Fresh Direct deliveries.
According to the Alliance for Downtown New York, I’m not the only one who’s drawn to the smell of the water. In the next two years the number of residents living south of Chambers Street will swell from 38,000 to 45,000. Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff is happy to report that the one square mile that is Manhattan’s southern tip is going through “the single biggest concentration of construction activity in New York’s history.” Thirty-eight million dollars are being invested in Fulton Street retail, the vacancy rate for Lower Manhattan is the lowest it’s been since 9/11
