Whole Foods Seen as Boost To TriBeCa

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The New York Sun

A new Whole Foods Market is set to open in TriBeCa on Wednesday, a welcome amenity, residents and real estate experts say, for a neighborhood that is seen as too quiet outside business hours.

Situated at the corner of Greenwich and Warren streets, the supermarket will span 69,000 square feet and include a “shucking station” for oysters and clams and a “Shawarma station” for Mediterranean foods.

About two blocks from the former World Trade Center site, the store is opening its doors on the heels of a report that the rebuilding of ground zero will take much longer than expected.

“Whole Foods is a huge company, a cutting-edge company, and if they put their flag downtown, they’re expressing confidence in the market for the area,” a retail broker for Newmark Knight Frank, Jeff Roseman, said. “It’s the right place at the right time.”

“It’s a sign of our maturity as a community,” the president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, Elizabeth Berger, said. “I think we’re seeing a population that’s here to stay and here to spend money.”

The neighborhoods south of Canal Street, in the blocks around ground zero, have been changing at a rapid pace in the past decade. What was once a primarily business-oriented region has been flooded with new, permanent residents.

A 2007 survey by the Alliance for Downtown estimated that 17,800 people moved into Lower Manhattan in the six years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the group says there are now more than 50,000 people living there. Community Board 1 projects that the area will have 76,000 residents by 2010.

Experts also say that the Whole Foods is an indicator not just of population growth, but of who comprises that population. The Alliance for Downtown estimates that the average household income for Lower Manhattan below Chambers Street is $242,000 a year.

“You had the old Gristede’s and the Food Emporium, but nothing that addressed the yuppies,” a retail consultant and broker for Prudential Douglas Elliman, Faith Hope Consolo, said. “Whole Foods is not for everyone. They’re not going to go into a housing project or a low-income area; not because they’re expensive, but because that’s not their image.”

Ms. Consolo said Whole Foods typically brings more business to an area.

“When they went into the Bowery, other retailers followed,” she said, referring to the Whole Foods that opened last year on Houston Street. “For an emerging neighborhood, one that’s not full of foot traffic, it’s a big draw.”

“The Whole Foods is positive news and emblematic of how the private sector can be good for the area,” the president of Community Board 1, Julie Menin, said. The ground zero report “shows that the only real development is coming from the private sector, not the public sector,” she said.

“Our neighborhood is changing,” a spokesman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Michael Murphy, said. “It’s gone from just a financial area to a 24/7 community, which needs amenities like a grocery store or a dry cleaners.”


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