The social and cultural history of Manhattan all began at the southern tip of the island. It was somewhere around the Battery in 1626 that Peter Minuet bought off the native residents for, so the legend goes, $24 in trinkets and claimed the place for the Dutch.
Over the next 300 years, the population migrated uptown, the focus of housing and retail moving from 14th Street to 34th to 42nd, filling in what had been empty lots and sheep runs.
When Charles Lewis Tiffany and John Young opened their luxury jewelry store in 1837, it was on Broadway just below Chambers Street. It took 100 years for the renowned jeweler to make its way up to 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. And now it’s back home.
In October, Tiffany’s opened a second Manhattan location on Wall Street, joining Hermès, Thomas Pink and a number of other fashion retailers in the downtown neighborhood. It’s always big news when a major retailer opens up in a new location. This time of year, it’s big news when that location is in New York, as our industry gathers for the December market and Manhattan sight-seeing and window-shopping. And it signals the re-generation of one more New York neighborhood, hair growing on yet another bald spot.
The men’s clothing store Hickey Freeman has opened on lower Broadway, and Canali, the high-end Italian men’s brand, will open next year. Prada Beauty has a spa at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on West Street. Sephora has signed a lease for a 7500-square-foot space at Broadway and Liberty Street. But it isn’t just silk suits and skin cream. Gristede’s, the Manhattan grocer, is opening on Maiden Lane.
“We are in the right place,” says Robert Chavez, president and ceo of Hermès USA, which opened on Broad Street in the fall. Chavez believes the store will be among the group’s top three revenue producers in the U.S. “And if the Hermès store does $3000 a square foot, you will see Prada, Gucci and Vuitton coming here,” says retail broker Robert Futterman.
After September 11, there was concern about new ventures in any part of Manhattan south of Canal Street. Now, lower Manhattan is being transformed. The New York Times reports that the population below Chambers Street has increased 30 percent since 2001, numbering just under 45,000, with a median household income of $165,000, about triple the median for Manhattan as a whole.
“We now have more of a 24/7 community, with laundries and bagel shops and all the things we need to live,” Beth Canavan, Tiffany’s executive vp, told the Times. “What was missing was some great retailing.”
And then there are the tourists – nearly 6 million a year, according to some counts – especially during the summer, when regular customers are on vacation or away for the weekend. There will be 5367 downtown hotel rooms by 2010, more than double the current total.
This shouldn’t be surprising. For the past 30 years, New York has abhorred a vacuum. Gone are so many of those dilapidated neighborhoods you didn’t used to go into at night: Upper West Side, Lower East Side, the East Village. Gone is the day when Barneys was the only reason to go below West 23rd Street. Or you went to Hell’s Kitchen (now a less-threateningly named Clinton) only for dinner and a Broadway show, then got in a cab and fled.
In the early 1970s, I worked with a guy who bought a loft in an old factory building near West Canal Street for about $35,000. “Are you nuts?” I asked. “There’s nothing there. It’s dark, dangerous, empty.”
That was my SoHo lesson in keeping my opinions to myself. I rarely say to anyone, anymore, “Are you nuts?” Things spin too fast these days.