200 Water Street, 2001

Quick Profile

The Seaport District sits between the Financial District to the south and the Brooklyn Bridge to the north. The original Seaport designation was limited to the streets east of Water Street from Fletcher Street to Dover Street and incorporated the actual Seaport and the piers. But no more. Today, the neighborhood boundaries have expanded westward toward Park Row and include a surge of new developments in the area around Pace University and City Hall Park.

This is not your father’s Seaport. It is no longer a commercial hub and the seafood industry, which operated out of the port for nearly two hundred years, has been displaced. The older low-rise buildings that line these cobblestoned streets have been repositioned, the SouthBridge towers complex to the east of Water Street has gone free market, multiple commercial buildings have been converted to residential usage and new gleaming residential towers are rising on the site of the iconic J&R Music World which once lined the east side of Park Row.  

Still, the Seaport is a small neighborhood, particularly quaint just north of Beekman Street. The streets are dominated by century-old warehouses and maritime buildings which gives the neighborhood its overt character. The Brooklyn Bridge, on its northern edge, looms in the backdrop.