Below Canal

Cast-iron warehouses, cobbled side streets, and the quietest twenty blocks in Lower Manhattan.

TriBeCa is an acronym — the Triangle Below Canal Street — coined by residents in the 1970s, at a point when the neighbourhood was an emptying warehouse district that artists were moving into because the lofts were enormous and the rent was nothing.

It has not been cheap for a long time. What it has kept is the built fabric that made it appealing in the first place: block after block of nineteenth-century commercial architecture, cast-iron storefronts, Belgian-block streets, and a street grid that predates the rectilinear plan imposed on the rest of Manhattan.

Where it is

Roughly: Canal Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Chambers Street and the World Trade Center site to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. The 'triangle' of the name is generous — the shape is closer to a trapezoid, which nobody has ever managed to make into a pronounceable acronym.

What is here

• Cast iron and the historic districts — what the buildings were for
• Duane Park and the streets — the oldest bits, and the strangest
• Galleries and art — what survived the move to Chelsea
• Film in Tribeca — the festival, and why it exists
• The waterfront — Hudson River Park piers 25 and 26
• Getting here

The character of the place

Tribeca is unusually quiet for Lower Manhattan. It has no major tourist attraction, the streets are wide and low-rise by Manhattan standards, and a great deal of it is residential conversion. On a Sunday morning it is one of the calmest parts of the island — which is the reason people who live here tend to be attached to it, and the reason visitors often walk through it without registering that they have.