By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
TRIBECA — One day back in 1982, Oliver Allen and his wife drove around Manhattan looking for a place to live.
The empty nesters from the suburbs knew they wanted to move into the city, but none of the neighborhoods they had seen felt quite right. They considered the Upper East Side — "too dull," Oliver said — and then SoHo — "it was just for artists" — before heading down Greenwich Street and turning a corner into the center of historic TriBeCa.
"We said, 'Holy smokes, look at this place,'" Allen recalled while sitting in his spacious Hudson Street loft earlier this month.
That first glimpse of TriBeCa’s stunning 19th-century architecture made a lasting impression on Allen, now 88, who has since become an expert on the neighborhood’s buildings and characters.
After decades of studying and living in the area, Allen recently wrote "Tribeca: A Pictorial History," a comprehensive look at the neighborhood’s evolution from cow-dotted farmland to the city’s celebrity and stroller capital.
Along the way, Allen delves into the biographies of those who shaped the neighborhood, from Pierre Toussaint, a liberated slave turned benefactor, to "Battery Dan" Finn, a colorful and beloved Tammany politician.
Allen sprinkles many interesting tidbits into the 144-page history, like the fact that the world’s first department store opened in 1846 at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. And who knew that an inventor secretly constructed an illegal fan-propelled subway beneath Broadway in 1870, decades before the first official city subway opened?
A former Life magazine editor who has written more than a dozen books, including histories of New York City and Tammany Hall, Allen said he has never encountered a neighborhood as fascinating as TriBeCa.
"The most interesting thing about this area, and I think it’s a little special this way, is that TriBeCa has changed completely twice," Allen said.
The first time was from the 1840s to the 1860s, when the area shifted from a residential neighborhood to a commercial district. The second time was in the 1960s, when artists began moving into the vacant buildings that wholesalers were steadily abandoning.
In between the two upheavals, TriBeCa was largely ignored by developers, which is what allowed so many historic brick, marble and cast-iron buildings to be preserved, Allen said.
Allen, who worked on the efforts to landmark TriBeCa over the past several decades, likes to wander around the neighborhood and guess the year buildings were constructed, just by looking at the materials and design. He often comes within a few years of being right, he said.
While Allen keeps uncovering new anecdotes from TriBeCa's past as he researches the columns he writes for the Tribeca Trib, he acknowledged that he probably knows more about the neighborhood than anyone living today.
"If there’s something that happened here, and I don’t know about it, I’d be very surprised," Allen said with a smile.
