Photographic Memory

From a Butter-and-Egg District to Affluent Enclave, Tribeca’s Transformation Observed

A new book by Carl Glassman, the co-founder (with his wife April Koral) of the highly regarded Lower Manhattan news source, the Tribeca Trib, offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the neighborhood he has observed and chronicled and lived in for nearly half a century. “Tribeca: Four Decades in Pictures” documents the transformation of a district of warehouses once known as Washington Market, or just the Lower West Side, into an urban residential oasis known by the portmanteau derived from “triangle below Canal.”

He and Ms. Koral, then dating, “moved here in 1979 because the newly built Independence Plaza was a middle-income, Mitchell-Lama housing complex,” Mr. Glassman recalls. “We had both been living on the Upper West Side in separate, tiny studio apartments, but managed to get on the waiting list, which was then only a year long.”

“I’m originally from Oklahoma City,” he says, “and we were there visiting my father when I retrieved a message on my reel-to-reel answering machine that said three apartments were available. April flew back to New York immediately, but by the time she got here, there was only one left. That unit was still open because it was in a dog-friendly part of Independence Plaza, which meant that many people didn’t want to move there.” They were offered a two bedroom apartment, “because in the 1970s, the Mitchell-Lama program had a policy that roommates who were different genders but not married qualified for separate bedrooms. We eventually married, but that extra space gave us room to start a family and have kids.”

Their initial rent for an apartment with a view of the Hudson River was $350 per month – serious money in those days, but still a bargain alongside the combined $165 and $350 that Mr. Glassman and Ms. Koral were paying for their apartments uptown. “At the time, neither of us had heard the name Tribeca,” he remembers. (This appears to have been adopted initially by real estate agents as marketing gimmick, then made official by the City Planning Commission, which vetoed the preferred, if somewhat snarky, choice of the area’s handful of residents at the time: “So So” – for South of SoHo.)

“We had once visited friends in another Independence Plaza building,” he says, “and when I looked out their window, the landscape was totally desolate.” This was mischief wrought by the Lower Manhattan Mixed-Use District, an urban renewal project that leveled many square blocks of legacy structures, with plans to create a new, modernist community of skyscrapers, but then went bust in the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

On their maiden night as Lower Manhattan residents, “we looked out the window and saw the lights of a giant ocean liner silently passing by. It was like a movie, or something from a dream,” Mr. Glassman says, with remembered awe.

“In our first couple of years,” he recalls, “we had to wheel a cart up to Greenwich Village to do grocery shopping, because there were no stores here. Most of the residents were artists. They eventually got together and formed a food co-op, which became the first local market. It was in a storefront owned by Trinity Church and donated to the community. You had to volunteer to become a member.”

The co-op market thrived, in part, he says, “because there were so many food warehouses nearby. April and I were assigned to go around to butter, egg, and dairy wholesalers, where we would buy provisions at bulk prices, then bring them back and package them for individual sale.”

If he had been able to see the future, “it would have made me sad to know that this would not always be a community of artists,” Mr. Glassman says. “I wish it had continued more in that vein. But in some ways, the community has changed for the better. I don’t miss it being so desolate.”

“Even if I had known that Tribeca would not remain a bohemian district,” he says, “I could never have predicted that the dozens of empty warehouses surrounding us – then effectively abandoned and occupied by pigeons – would be turned into apartments worth millions of dollars.”

Mr. Glassman and Ms. Koral started the Tribeca Trib in 1994, and are celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. (He is the photographer and editor; she serves as publisher.) “It was right around the time that we started the Trib that the zoning changed and a handful of preservationists fought until the Landmarks Preservation Commission agreed to create several Historic Districts,” he says, “which meant that it was no longer legally possible to demolish most of the remaining buildings.”

“The fabric of the neighborhood consists of these buildings and their architecture,” he says. “Even now, all these years later, I love to see old photos and recognize what it still here. The scale gives Tribeca a non-Manhattan feel. It is still very quiet here, which I love.”

Looking back on the record he has created and curated in “Tribeca: Four Decades in Pictures,” Mr. Glassman reflects that, “I am both a photojournalist and a street photographer, and the book combines those visions. It contains pictures shot for stories, which stand alone, along with small, human moments observed, not taken for any particular story. Each of these roles has its own rewards.” Or, as he observes in the book, “for me, the photographing could go on forever.”