Apseity Facto

More than 100 residents of the Financial District, along with elected officials and representatives of City government agencies, were on hand for the February 11 kickoff meeting of the FiDi Neighborhood Association.

Although Lower Manhattan’s other communities (Tribeca, Battery Park City, and the Seaport/Civic Center District) have long had a strong local identity and distinct voice, this meeting (hosted by the Pine Street School) marked the first time that neighbors living in the vicinity of Wall Street have gathered to organize and raise their profile.

Sienam Lulla and Patrick Kennell on Fulton Street

Founding president Patrick Kennell envisions the FiDi Neighborhood Association as more about the betterment of the community than about politics, with goals such as bringing families together and helping to improve the look and feel of the neighborhood.

Among the fledgling group’s priorities is adding color and life to the streetscape, removing scaffolding that has covered the facades of some buildings for years, and creating a plan for more efficient trash pickup.

State Senator Daniel Squadron was on hand to offer encouragement to the attendees, while officials from the City’s Department of Sanitation began a dialog about how to keep local streets cleaner. Other topics raised by residents encompassed everything from resiliency and security to cultural programming and mitigating the impact of construction.

Association vice president, Sienam Lulla predicts that the FiDi Neighborhood Association will help galvanize residents of the Financial District. “A goal is that more families start looking at FiDi as a complete neighborhood,” Mrs. Lulla says. “I’m super excited. We’re onto something that will energize people in the area. It is an association of the entire neighborhood.” After the meeting, Ms. Lulla remarked, “the community was excited to have a voice through the Association.”

In at least one respect, the emergence of the FiDi Neighborhood Association could not have come at a more propitious time for the community. The area around Wall Street is the fastest growing residential area of Lower Manhattan, and its population is skyrocketing more quickly than almost any other area of the City, or the nation.

According to research by Diana Switaj, the Director of Planning and Land Use and Community Board 1, the Financial District neighborhood will gain more than 1,200 new apartments before 2016 is over, through a combination of new construction and conversion of old office buildings. These will be followed by an additional 3,000-plus apartments in 2017 and the years that follow, according to plans announced by developers. (These tallies seem poised to inflate, because several large projects — such as 80 Water Street, which will enclose more than one million square feet of interior space — have not yet announced how many apartments they will contain.) But multiplying just the number of announced new dwellings by the average household size for Lower Manhattan (1.94 persons) seems to indicate that the Financial District (an area of less than four-tenths of a square mile) will soon have more than 8,000 new residents.

Whether the community (or the rest of Lower Manhattan, which is also growing) will be able to deliver services like transportation, police protection, healthcare, and education to this many people remains an open question. At the very least, it appears that the new organization will have no shortage of issues to consider in the years ahead. The FiDi Neighborhood Association will next meet at 6:30 pm on April 14 at 180 Maiden Lane.

Jonathan Perelman
photos by Robert Simko