Changes fuel growth in neighborhoods near Ground Zero

A birds-eye view of the construction at Ground Zero. (Sept.... — A birds-eye view of the construction at Ground Zero. (Sept. 9, 2010) Credit: Charles Eckert

By TED PHILLIPS. Special to NewsdaySeptember 18, 2010

Amid loud debate nationally about a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center site, less has been said about the changing character and booming growth of lower Manhattan neighborhoods. A new downtown is rising - with more than double the population and more than double the residential units of 2001, according to the Downtown Alliance, a business improvement district.

"We've had incredible population growth in the lower Manhattan neighborhood," said Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board One, which covers most of Manhattan below Canal Street. "It puts pressure on the infrastructure - for the schools, for recreational facilities. That's one of the challenges that the neighborhood faces."

Some critics say the proximity of Park 51, the planned Islamic center and mosque, to Ground Zero is inappropriate; The center, if built, will be one-tenth of a mile away. But there is no one character or way to classify the surrounding areas. North, west, south and east of the WTC site, four distinct - albeit intertwined - neighborhoods are home to the well-heeled and the middle class, businesses sleazy and businesses sleek, investment banks and government offices, fast-food franchises and mom-and-pop shops. It is all quintessential New York - teeming with life and change.

South Tribeca: North of WTC site

On Sept. 11, congregants at St. Peter's Catholic Church, a block north of Ground Zero, walked up its granite steps and through its columns for the first time in almost a year. The Greek-Revival-style church where the city's oldest Catholic parish has worshiped since 1840 looks timeless, but a just-completed $2-million renovation was made possible by change. The church raised the money by selling air rights to the developer of Barclay Tower, a 58-story luxury apartment building next door where a one-bedroom apartment lists for $3,895 a month.

"The number of baby carriages I've seen down here, strollers, and people just walking around with kids is just amazing compared to 1999 when I first arrived here," said the Rev. Kevin Madigan. "An awful lot of young families are moving in here because the schools are pretty good in the neighborhood, but also on the weekends it's kind of quiet."

Madigan compared the uproar over Park51, which would be a block and a half away, to the prejudice Catholics faced earlier in America. "The fact is that those who believe in Islam have proved to be as supportive of American democracy as anyone else," he said. "They should build it there because it represents a face of Islam that is totally opposite to that of the terrorists who committed the atrocity on September 11th."

A trickle of well-dressed residents emerging from the apartment tower paid no interest to a homeless woman sleeping at the top of the church's steps. They ambled past a long-stalled 70-story hotel and condo project through streets that are home to government office buildings, bars and cafes, an Off-Track Betting parlor, and a Borough of Manhattan Community College building bearing the slogan "Start Here. Go Anywhere." Last year, Forbes magazine said the ZIP code where Park51 would be built was the 28th most expensive in the nation, with a median household income of $112,947.

SEE PHOTOS9/11/2001 in photos

Tom Short, 53, a visiting evangelical Christian minister from Columbus, Ohio, said he stopped by the old Burlington Coat Factory where the center would be built to see how close it was to Ground Zero.

Short said he was "concerned that Muslims have a long history of building mosques as places of triumph and victory."

Even on a quiet weekend afternoon, supporters and opponents held up signs near the building and engaged in debates while the curious stopped by and snapped photos.

"How many miles away should it take before the First Amendment kicks in?" asked Matt Sky, 26, a Web page developer from the East Village. "That's what we fight and die for are these principles."

Battery Park City: West of WTC site

Battery Park City is the one neighborhood in New York where old and new architectural styles don't coexist. The simple lines of brick, glass and steel that rose from 92 acres of landfill where piers once jutted into the Hudson River were all completed over the last 30 years.

At the top of the stairs beneath the glass ceiling of the Winter Garden in the World Financial Center, people come to gaze eastward through IMAX-sized windows at cranes lifting girders high on One World Trade Center. Camera flashes illuminate figures silhouetted against the rising skyline.

On a recent weekend, tour guide Lee Gelber described the planes hitting the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, the search for survivors, the deadly 2007 fire at the former Deutsche Bank building and the current reconstruction. Outside, welders' sparks flew hundreds of feet above One World Trade.

The very first question Gelber fielded was about Park51. "We had a question about the location of this mosque that's been in the news a lot," a man in the multinational tour group said.

"It's over two blocks from here in so-called 'hallowed ground,' " Gelber said. "You already have an Off-Track Betting place there, there's a bar and lap-dance place close by, so hallowed who? . . . Look at the neighbors."

Cut off from Manhattan by West Street's six traffic lanes, Battery Park City is an island unto itself, with its residential towers, a multiplex and places to shop. Financial giants including American Express and Bank of America-Merrill Lynch lease large chunks of the 7.6-million square feet of office space there, and Goldman Sachs & Co. recently opened its 43-story headquarters diagonally across from the trade center site. Most of the area buildings are residential, and on weekends people with baby strollers and dogs on leashes join tourists, cyclists and sunbathers on the waterfront esplanade and in cafes and parks.

Jin and Jennifer Seok recently moved to the area from Brooklyn's Park Slope. So far, they are not fans.

"This is a wealthy neighborhood," said Jennifer, 26, a part-time student and administrative assistant. "It's very stuffy."

Jennifer said she and her husband are "100 percent" for Park51.

"I don't think a lot of people in Manhattan are all that concerned about it," said Jin Seok, 31, who has a technology support job. "People don't care if a mosque goes up; people are busy."

Still, they acknowledged it's a touchy subject.

"I don't bring it up with people I don't know," Jennifer said.

Greenwich South: South of WTC site

Greenwich South, a new name for the sliver between Broadway and West Street, south of Ground Zero, is the kind of place tourists stumble upon after visiting the Tribute WTC Visitor Center on Liberty Street.

Boxing gloves pattered against punching bags as passersby said "Hi" to John Snow, manager of Trinity Boxing Club on Greenwich Street. The gym's proximity to Wall Street attracts financial types looking to cap off days of trying to beat the market with some physical aggression.

"It's great for stress relief," said Snow, 43, who has managed the family-owned gym since it opened six years ago and lives upstairs. Like a referee trying to calm two fighters, Snow has tried to see both sides of the Park51 debate.

"You have to respect everybody's rights - and to realize why it's a sensitive issue," he said. An interfaith chapel at Park 51 could be a compromise to bring together people of different faiths, he said.

Construction crews and a growing number of residents walk past pizzerias, bodegas, storefronts for rent and vacant lots that dot blocks of office buildings recently turned into apartments or condos.

A one-bedroom apartment on West Street, with views of the rising towers at Ground Zero, rents for $2,575. The well-heeled can savor a $700 bottle of Cristal on the fifth-floor of the new 57-story W Hotel and condo tower while marking the progress of the floor-by-floor deconstruction of the former Deutsche Bank building.

What is thought "appropriate" to the area varies by place and individual.

Behind the bar at O'Hara's Pub, a sticker showed disapproval of the Islamic center, with an icon of a mosque with a red slash through it and the words "Mosque at Ground Zero." The Downtown Alliance, a business improvement district, considers the blocks south of the trade center site as ripe for development. At the Pussycat Lounge, a strip club, a dancer said having a gentlemen's lounge so close to Ground Zero was not inappropriate.

Financial District: East of WTC site

During the week, the streets below the Financial District's office buildings, directly east of the World Trade Center site, bustle with businessmen and women dashing to meetings. On weekends, tourists fill the heart of American capitalism, clutching Century 21 bags as they walk down Broadway between visits to Ground Zero, Wall Street and the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

The neighborhood used to be more of a ghost town, said John Koyas, a Brooklyn-reared native of Turkey who owns the Tower Art Gallery and Custom Framing store on Maiden Lane. More recently, families have become prevalent. A studio apartment above a Maiden Lane Vietnamese sandwich shop rents for $2,095 a month.

Koyas, who now lives in Parsippany, N.J., pinned controversy over Park51 on outsiders. "The people that live here, they're fine with it," he said. "It seems to be people with less contact with an international crowd that have the most problems with it."

Kim Steinberg, who was walking her Maltese recently on Nassau Street, has seen the neighborhood change for "good and bad" since moving here from her native Puerto Rico as a toddler.

"It does get crowded down here," said Steinberg, 18, a sophomore at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Still, she likes living where she sees familiar faces on the street.

Steinberg said she can understand both sides of the controversy about Park51, but that it isn't a concern of hers.

"This is supposed to be the land of the free," she said. "They have every right to build it, but they also have to understand that there are going to be people who have issues with it."

St. Paul's Chapel, whose cemetery is across Church Street from Ground Zero, has become a kind of shrine to 9/11. A tour guide asked a group to imagine the chapel's gates plastered, as once they were, with fliers of the missing, by families hoping their loved ones would be found. Going back further in time, the guide pointed to the old site of P.T. Barnum's museum of oddities, where today the J&R electronics store takes up a full block.

Tanja Studer and her boyfriend, Patrick DeBoer, vacationing Swiss university students, visited the chapel and carefully read a timeline of 9/11. "I don't think it's a good idea to build an Islamic church here because it's controversial," said Studer, 21. Terrorists who were Muslims "destroyed the World Trade Center and now they want to build a center for these people?"

Still, when told the center wouldn't be on the site, she said she might rethink her opinion.

"It's a good thing to build," said DeBoer, 22. "We shouldn't think that everyone is bad because he is Islamic."