There is one conspicuous omission in the advertisements for One York, a sleek, glassy condominium building set to open in the spring of 2008: Canal Street.

The building’s façade faces the busy thoroughfare, known for its discount vendors, intense traffic, and jewelry exchanges, yet the marketing team chose to describe it only as “elegantly poised between TriBeCa and dynamic SoHo.”

Like many brokers and community officials, the developer of One York — which is named for a small side street that runs along the building’s south side — Stanley Perelman, says he believes Canal Street as most people know it is disappearing.

“For a long time this area, this street, attracted schlocky retailers — it was a void,” Mr. Perelman, who is also managing principal of JANI Real Estate, said. Now, however, “all of these retailers are going to be gone and this is going to be a different, dynamic neighborhood.”

Canal Street is being squeezed by SoHo to the north and TriBeCa to the south, with an increasing number of developers buying up the tenements there and raising rents.

“Canal Street is the last frontier,” the head of retail brokerage at Prudential Douglas Elliman, Faith Hope Consolo, said. The area is poised to become “the next Lower East Side,” she added.

Along the entire length of Canal Street, developers are buying up sites for redevelopment. At a onestory building at Lafayette and Canal streets, for example, developers are planning to tear down a building that now houses several discount vendors and replace it with a five-story, glass office building with retail space and wraparound, electronic signs.

“We don’t see the future of Canal Street in what’s there, which is mostly trinkets,” one of the developers, Earle Altman, said.

Mr. Altman and co-developers Jay Casely and Keith Lipstein said they were considering several options for the building, including a banking center with a major financial institution as the anchor, or a jewelry exchange similar to what can be found in Hong Kong.

Other developments include a 20-story glass hotel at 370 Canal St., and a five-story commercial building under way at Canal and Centre streets by veteran Chinatown developer Alex Chu.

At One York, Mr. Perelman has sold 55% of the 35 units, including a seventh-floor apartment for $20 million to the telecom entrepreneur Michael Hirtenstein, who is spending another $10 million in upgrades. The building’s duplex penthouse, which is 6,600 square feet, is on the market for $25 million. Mr. Perelman also said he is in talks with prominent restaurateurs about a large space on the ground floor of the building.

With all these new buildings, in addition to the numerous other projects on the outskirts of Canal

Street, including the nine-story SoHo Mews at 311 West Broadway and the 45-story Trump SoHo, there will be many more retail spaces to accommodate a growing number of pedestrians.

In preparation for these changes, rents in the area are already beginning to rise. On Canal and Washington Street, for example, the rent on a 1,200-square-foot space has increased to $150 from about $75 a square foot in just three years, an executive vice president at Lansco, Robin Abrams, said. Farther east, at 198 Canal St., a 4,500-square-foot space is renting for $350 a square foot. In contrast, the average rate for Manhattan retail space is $107 a square foot, according to the Real Estate Board of New York.

“That’s just crazy,” Ms. Abrams said. “This used to be the area where you went to Uncle Steve’s electronics store to get an alarm system for your house.” Once a well-known restaurant or a gallery moves in, others will follow, she added.

The landlord of 254 Canal St., Michael Salzhauer, said banks are also flocking to the area, and at his building, which has two banks as tenants, they are paying $350 a square foot.

“For a long time I thought that Chinatown was going to crowd out SoHo,” Mr. Salzhauer, whose grandfather bought the building in the 1950s, said. “Now I see SoHo crowding out Chinatown, especially the western part.”

As gentrification comes to Canal Street, local Chinese business owners are considering ways to band together, draw more tourists to the street, and increase their revenues so that they can afford the higher rents and stay in Manhattan.

“If you don’t maintain the vitality of your neighborhood it will go by the wayside,” the executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corp., Wellington Chen, said. Already some stores have started moving to Flushing, where rent is lower and parking is widely available, he said. “It would be a shame to lose this truly unique cultural place to forces at work here. The old Jewish neighborhood is gone. So is the old Irish neighborhood. Little Italy is just a few blocks now.”