The area was first populated in the 1700s as the city grew northward from the original Dutch settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan, and open farmland gave way to a budding residential neighborhood of three-story Federal Style brick townhouses.
By the 1840s, the force of commerce arrived in TriBeCa, and imposing commercial buildings soon replaced those genteel townhouses as the district evolved into the bustling center of America's textile and dry goods industries. By the end of the Civil War, shipping had shifted from the East River to the many-birthed piers of the Hudson, and trade exploded along the area's cobbled streets. Robust Italianate warehouses and factories with arched colonnades inspired by Renaissance palazzos sprang up to accommodate businesses. The magnificent square now known as Duane Park was the center of the butter, eggs and cheese trade; Franklin Street, once known as Sugar Loaf Street, was the center of the flour and sugar trade.
The first palaces of commerce for such thriving enterprises were made of marble and stone. But the advent of an innovative new construction technique soon gave the area around Franklin Place what would become its defining architectural character: cast iron.
Cast iron, a predecessor to the steel that later rendered modern skyscrapers possible, was developed in Europe around 1800 and first used to build bridges and textile mills. This revolution in construction technology allowed architects to build taller and larger structures than masonry had ever permitted, as evidenced by the monumental winter gardens — most famously Joseph Paxton's 1851 Crystal Palace in London — and vast halls of Victorian-era railway stations, shopping arcades and library reading rooms of the era. Cast iron found its way to America as a structural material that allowed bigger spans, higher ceilings and bigger windows. But it was the American ingenuity of James Bogardus, a New York architect and inventor, that made cast iron all the rage in the facades of commercial buildings in Downtown New York City.
Bogardus realized cast iron's decorative potential — the metal could be forged into ornate facades more quickly and much more inexpensively than traditional carved stone — and developed a technique for mass-producing these designs in prefabricated sections that could be clipped onto the structural frames of buildings. The fluted columns, delicate capitals and detailed entablatures executed in styles ranging from Italianate to Second Empire, could even be painted in a variety of colors; New York became replete with these elements. In the words of the AIA Guide to New York City, "More Corinthian, Ionic, Doric, Composite, Egyptian, and Lord-knows-what-else columns were cast for New York facades of the 1850s and 1860s than Greece and Rome turned out in a millennium."
Dozens of warehouses and factories with elaborate cornices and repetitive classical columns rose along TriBeCa's burgeoning commercial streets in the 19th century, giving the neighborhood the rich architectural character it still boasts today. Some of the best surviving examples of cast-iron architecture in the world are located in TriBeCa and neighboring SoHo. Among them are the Italianate Cary Building at Chambers and Church Streets (1856), designed by King & Kellum; the Grosvenor Building at 385 Broadway (1875), the work of Charles Wright; 361 Broadway, with crisply patterned vines wrapping the columns; and two buildings by Bogardus, the former Hopkins Store at 75 Murray Street (1857) and 85 Leonard Street (1862).
History was made in these structures. At 361 Broadway, a corner building at Franklin Street with intersecting, late cast-iron facades, passersby can see a faintly visible sign painted atop the south lotline wall: "359 Brady's Gallery." The reference is to the studio that photographer Matthew Brady maintained next door, beneath the sign. Abraham Lincoln came there to be photographed the morning after his famed Cooper Union speech, which many believe won him the American presidency. And Brady, widely considered the father of modern photojournalism, famously went on to record the Civil War in thousands of haunting battlefield photographs that are today considered masterpieces.
TriBeCa thrived as a commercial hub well into the 20th century, the eastern part of the neighborhood for textiles and dry goods manufacturing, the western part for the food wholesalers and retailers that made TriBeCa the breadbasket of New York City (the mammoth Washington Market, demolished in the late 1960s to make way for the World Trade Center, was the city's largest). In the 1950s, however, these two pillars of the local economy disappeared as the food businesses closed or moved to the Bronx, and factories left the city altogether.
TriBeCa's sturdy warehouses were abandoned, its streets left virtually empty, and its extraordinary spaces forgotten until artists and other urban pioneers began moving to the area. Drawn by the promise of lofts with high ceilings and dirt cheap rents, artists settled in and eventually succeeded in gaining legalized live-work zoning status in the early 1970s. The next phase in the evolution of TriBeCa began in earnest: Notable restaurants, galleries and shops arrived in the district during the 1980s and 90s, followed by the TriBeCa Film Festival. Thus, benign neglect proved to be TriBeCa's saving grace; its once forgotten buildings and historic streets are protected under four separate historic district designations by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
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