BPC is swinging for the fences
By MAX GROSS
Battery Park City had always been one half positive, one half negative.
BPC was nice, certainly. It was quiet. It came with a stunning view of the water. The buildings were eco-friendly. (One-fifth of Manhattan’s LEED-certified residences are in the nabe.) And it came with greenery and good landscaping.
But it was also dismissed by some as too isolated, too antiseptic and too suburban to compete in this gritty metropolis.
In recent months, though, there’s been a surge of restaurants and gourmet markets into Battery Park city — establishing it, finally, as a real neighborhood.
“We didn’t expect what’s here,” says Salvatore Rasa, who moved to the Verdesian, an eco-friendly rental building at the north end of the neighborhood, three years ago with his wife, Maggie Allen, after spending roughly 30 years in Greenwich Village. “We expected a corporate environment; dull and uninteresting. What we found is really diverse. There are more kids than we thought, more pets than we thought.”
It was always a tall order, getting the necessary commercial venues to make this neighborhood work. For one thing, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of available space. (“There are no remaining sites” available for development, says Lydia Rapillo, vice president of residential leasing at Albanese Organization, one of the pioneer developers in the neighborhood.)
Plus, all the new buildings erected have to be eco-friendly, according to guidelines set by the Battery Park City Authority, which made them slightly more expensive.
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