TRIBECA, TRIANGLE BELOW CANAL STREET & FESTIVAL

Today, The Grandma has visited one of the most expensive neighbourhoods of New York City, Tribeca. She has wanted to know more about the Tribeca Film Festival and its activities.

Meanwhile, The Newtons have been preparing their Cambridge Exam. They have studied the Future Simple.

More info: Future Simple

Tribeca, originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of Triangle Below Canal Street.

The triangle (more accurately a quadrilateral) is bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Chambers Street. By the 2010s, a common marketing tactic was to extend Tribeca's southern boundary to either Vesey or Murray streets to increase the appeal of property listings.

The neighborhood began as farmland, then was a residential neighbourhood in the early 19th century, before becoming a mercantile area centered on produce, dry goods, and textiles, and then transitioning to artists and then actors, models, entrepreneurs and other celebrities.

The neighbourhood is home to the Tribeca Film Festival, which was created in response to the September 11 attacks, to reinvigorate the neighbourhood and downtown after the destruction caused by the terrorist attacks.

Tribeca is part of Manhattan Community District 1, and its primary ZIP Codes are 10007 and 10013. It is patrolled by the 1st Precinct of the New York City Police Department.

Tribeca is one of a number of neighbourhoods in New York City whose names are syllabic abbreviations or acronyms, including SoHo (South of Houston Street), NoHo (North of Houston Street), Nolita (North of Little Italy), NoMad (North of Madison Square), DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and BoCoCa, the last of which is actually a collection of neighborhoods (Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens).

The name was coined in the early 1970s and originally applied to the area bounded by Broadway and Canal, Lispenard, and Church Streets. which appears to be a triangle on city planning maps. 

Residents of this area formed the TriBeCa Artists' Co-op in filing legal documents connected to a 1973 zoning dispute. According to a local historian, the name was misconstrued by a newspaper reporter as applying to a much larger area, which is how it came to be the name of the current neighborhood.

More information: Tribeca Citizen

The area now known as Tribeca, or TriBeCa, was farmed by Dutch settlers to New Amsterdam, prominently Roeleff Jansen (who obtained the land patent, called Dominie's Brouwery, from Wouter van Twiller in 1636) and his wife Anneke Jans who later married Everardus Bogardus. The land stayed with the family until 1670 when the deed was signed over to Col. Francis Lovelace.

In 1674 the Dutch took possession of the area until the English reclaimed the land a year later. In 1674, representing the Duke of York, Governor Andros took possession of the land.

Tribeca was later part of the large tract of land given to Trinity Church by Queen Anne in 1705.

In 1807, the church built St. John's Chapel on Varick Street and then laid out St. John's Park, bounded by Laight Street, Varick Street, Ericsson Place, and Hudson Street. The church also built Hudson Square, a development of brick houses which surrounded the park, which would become the model for Gramercy Park. The area was among the first residential neighbourhoods developed in New York City beyond the city's colonial boundaries, and remained primarily residential until the 1840s.

Several streets in the area are named after Anthony Lispenard Bleecker and the Lispenard family. Beach Street was created in the late 18th century and was the first street on or adjacent to the farm of Anthony Lispenard Bleecker, which was just south of what is now Canal Street; the name of the street is a corruption of the name of Paul Bache, a son-in-law of Anthony Lispenard. Lispenard Street in Tribeca is named for the Lispenard family, and Bleecker Street in NoHo was named for Anthony Lispenard Bleecker.

By the early 21st century, Tribeca became one of Manhattan's most fashionable and desirable neighborhoods, well known for its celebrity residents. Its streets teem with art galleries, boutique shops, restaurants, and bars.

The Tribeca Festival is an annual film festival organized by Tribeca Productions. It takes place each spring in New York City, showcasing a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive programming. Tribeca was founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2002 to spur the economic and cultural revitalization of lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Until 2021, the festival was known as the Tribeca Film Festival.

Each year the festival hosts over 600 screenings with approximately 150,000 attendees, and awards independent artists in 23 juried competitive categories.

More information: Tribeca Film

Some people say,
"New York's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
I say that about other places.

Robert De Niro