TIMES ARE A CHANGING

You Can Now Live in What Was Once ‘The World’s Costliest Real Estate Plot’

One Wall Street, an underappreciated Art Deco stunner, sits on land that once fetched a mighty high price.

Manhattan’s Financial District, long known as a gloomy warren of tangled streets and skyscrapers with a reputation for turning into a ghost town after 5 p.m., at last seems to be coming into its own as a genuine neighborhood. The transformation has unfolded slowly, with dozens of former banking headquarters retrofitted for residential use over the past two decades. With the conversions has come a wave of new residents, and with the increased population has come an increase in the number and quality of everyday amenities available in the area.

Among the more visible signs of change in the Financial District (or “FiDi,” to save a few syllables) is the gleaming new Whole Foods store which recently opened on Broadway just around the corner from Wall Street. It may seem trivial—there are, after all, a dozen other Whole Foods locations on Manhattan Island—but the store is a vote of corporate confidence in the area’s long-term viability as a neighborhood.

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Keith Taillon

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