Recharging the Battery

And Butch joined the army
Yeah that's where he's been
And the jackhammer's diggin'
Up the sidewalks again
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
—“In the Neighborhood,” Tom Waits

I’ve been posting from Lower Manhattan off and on for 10 months now, and only recently I realized I haven’t described what it’s like living down here.

When I launched this blog from midtown’s Hell’s Kitchen in 2004, I had already been living there 7 years. I knew what that funky little ‘hood was all about. I still miss its gritty 'tude.

I have to admit, it’s taken a while for me to get a handle on life in Lower Manhattan. But now I think I know enough to begin writing about it. So in this post I’ll start with the obvious, and in later posts I’ll discuss the not so obvious.

As soon as you climb out of most any subway station down here, the obvious—construction going on seemingly everywhere—assaults you with the sounds of jackhammers, barked orders and debris tossed into dumpsters.

Streets are being torn up and fiber optic cable laid, wiring Manhattan’s oldest neighborhood into the 21st century. The expansion of the Bowling Green subway station has made a mess of Battery Park’s northeast end. Along the narrow divide of Exchange Place, across from where I live, a onetime office building was gutted by non-union labor. For weeks after I moved here last March, an inflatable rat bigger than me, erected by protesting union workers, stood watch over the site 24/7. Now the rat is gone as electricians, plumbers, welders, carpenters and other tradesmen turn the place into a residential facility.

After 9/11, countless businesses fled Lower Manhattan for the industrial parks of New Jersey and Long Island. Today the plan is to transform the old Financial District into the midtown of the south end, a better-balanced mix of offices and residences. Realtors boast in the media how downtown is the latest boomtown in the Big Town. Don’t believe the hype. It’s nowhere near boomtown yet. But by 2008 or so, it could be.

For now, in addition to the money men and women who like living a short walk from work, people like me live down here, intrepid sorts who decided to stick a fork in Bin Laden’s eye, take advantage of the discounted rents and, in some cases, start a business. Downtown shops and restaurants still struggle 4 years out from 9/11, but the general feeling is that the worst is over. Baby strollers are starting to appear more often. More dog walkers are about. You get the feeling that, slowly, Lower Manhattan is lifting itself off the mat.

Still, for now, most of the local bars and takeout places are only open weekdays, when the area bristles with the pulsating energy of The Street. Commerce still lies at the heart of activity in these parts. Weekends a steady infusion of tourists always makes Saturday interesting, but Sunday the place turns into a ghost town. When I first moved here, I thought I would learn to love the weekend stillness. In fact, the opposite is true. Chalk it up to 13 years of living in Manhattan’s more electric neighborhoods. Or perhaps it’s just that I want to have better things to do than while away my weekends with the security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs of Wall Street.

By and large, New Yorkers have processed 9/11 and been able to put it in a place that’s never far from memory but more removed from pain. In Lower Manhattan, most of us can walk by the tall, barbed-wire fence enclosing that gaping hole in the ground at the World Trade Center site without having it disrupt our thoughts of the moment. New Yorkers are nothing if not forward thinking. And it’s in that spirit of moving on that residents of Lower Manhattan are able to deal with the overt daily nuisances of a neighborhood in transition, slowly metamorphosing into something better.