A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from August 07, 2004
TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal Street)
"Tribeca" means TRIangle BElow CAnal Street. After the 1960s success of "SoHo," many other neighborhood nicknames were suggested. 'Tribeca" has been cited in print since at least 1974.

An inhabitant of Tribeca is called a "Tribecan."


Wikipedia: TriBeCa
Tribeca (sometimes stylized as TriBeCa, pronounced /traɪˈbɛkə/) is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA. Its name is an acronym based on the words "Triangle below Canal Street": the triangle is properly bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Vesey Street. The neighborhood is home to the Tribeca Film Festival.
(...)
Etymology
Lispenard Street, a single block immediately below Canal Street, is wide on the Church Street side but is narrower at Broadway. Thus, it appears as a triangle on City maps, not like a rectangle as most city blocks are depicted. The Lispenard Street residents decided to name their group the Triangle Below Canal Block Association, and, as activists had done in SoHo, shortened the group’s name to the Tribeca Block Association.

A reporter covering the zoning story for The New York Times came across the block association’s submission to City Planning, and mistakenly assumed that the name Tribeca referred to the entire neighborhood, not just one block. Once the “newspaper of record” began referring to the neighborhood as Tribeca, it stuck. This was related by former resident and councilmember for the area, Kathryn Freed, who was involved in the 1970s Tribeca zoning effort.

24 November 1974, New York (NY) Times, pg. 10:
Of immediate concern is the Washington Market area, also known as Tribeca (for "Triangle below Canal Street"), where an illegal community of loft dwellers, much like the early SoHo, has recently surfaced.

12 October 1975, New York (NY) Times, pg. 184:
And the younger artists are looking in NoHo, SoCa, and TriBeCa - north of Houston, south of Canal, and the triangle below Canal - for the cheap lofts they once went to SoHo for.

30 April 1976, New York (NY) Times, pg. 67:
IT'S called TriBeCa, though nobody's wild about the name. That's City Planning Commission short talk for Triangle Below Canal Street, but those who live there have other designations for it - Lo Cal, Washington Market, the Lower West Side or even SoSo (for South of Soho).

Larger than SoHo in area, TriBeCa lies next to the financial district, a triangle (really a trapezoid) bounded by Canal Street on the north, Barclay Street on the south, West Street, and Broadway on the east.
Posted by Barry Popik
New York CityNeighborhoods • Saturday, August 07, 2004 • Permalink


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