Below Canal

A guide to Tribeca — the triangle below Canal Street.

Below Canal is an independent neighbourhood guide. It is not affiliated with the 92nd Street Y, 92NY, the former 92YTribeca venue, the Tribeca Festival, or any organisation or business described here.

Cast iron and the historic districts

This was a wholesale district — textiles, dry goods, butter, eggs and cheese — and the buildings were engineered for it.

Almost everything worth looking at in Tribeca was built to store or trade something. Understanding that makes the neighbourhood legible.

Why the buildings look like this

From the mid-nineteenth century this was the wholesale district serving the port a few blocks east. Goods came off the ships, were stored in warehouses here, and were traded from counting houses on the ground floors.

That produced a very specific building type: wide floor plates for storage, tall ground floors for loading, big windows for daylight in an era before reliable electric light, and heavy loading doors onto the street. When these were converted to lofts in the 1970s, all of those features turned out to be exactly what artists wanted.

Cast iron

Cast-iron facades were a mid-century innovation — components cast in a foundry, shipped to the site and bolted together. They allowed larger windows than masonry, they could be ordered from a catalogue in classical styles, and they were cheap and fast.

SoHo has the more famous concentration, but Tribeca has a substantial one, often mixed with brick and stone in ways that reward looking up. Painted cast iron is easy to identify — a magnet sticks to it, and the columns usually show bolt lines.

The four historic districts

The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Tribeca in parts rather than as a single area, producing four districts — Tribeca West, Tribeca East, Tribeca North and Tribeca South. The boundaries are irregular because the designation followed the surviving building stock rather than the street grid.

The practical effect is that facades cannot be altered without approval, which is why the streetscape has stayed coherent through decades of very expensive residential conversion.

Things to look for