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Robert Ripps book
History of Tribeca Buildings
Crowd Sourcing: Do you have a list of all the books set in Tribeca?
R. wrote: “I recently stumbled onto the Timothy Wilde trilogy by Lyndsey Faye, crime mystery novels that take place in 1845 as NYC formed its first police force, and most of the action takes place in what is now Tribeca, with bits in Soho and Fidi. She really gives you a feel for what our neighborhood and its politics was like 180 years ago, when everything above 14th was farms and forests. Might be fun to compile a list of fiction and non-fiction that takes place in Tribeca.”
And here we are! I have to admit I could only think of a few, but I also checked with Tribecan Sid Karger, whose own novel, Best Men, features the Odeon’s ice cream stand among other New York hotspots. Hoping the comments can fill in the rest.
Bright Lights, Big City
The Odeon and other Downtown locales feature big in Jay McInerney’s now-classic from the 1980s.
Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe’s novel from 1987 travels from the South Bronx to the Upper East Side to the New York Stock Exchange in Fidi.
Triburbia
Tribeca writer Karl Taro Greenfeld’s first novel came out in 2012.
A Turn in Fortune, Heirs on Fire and lots more
Battery Park City resident Jon Pepper sets his corporate satires largely in Lower Manhattan.
The Hole in the Rabbit
Tribecan Amy Sewell’s newest novel — about a reality show producer and mother of three, is set in Tribeca among other spots.
City on Fire
The 2015 novel by Garth Risk Hallberg takes place in New York City in the 1970s after a Central Park shooting. It is Hallberg’s first published novel.
Let the Great World Spin
The 2009 novel by Colum McCann is set mainly in New York City and includes a fictionalized accounts of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk across the Twin Towers, the date on which the two main events of the novel occur: a fatal car crash and a trial.
American Psycho
The black comedy horror novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991, is told in the first-person by a Manhattan investment banker who lives a double life as a serial killer. The setting is Wall Street.
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A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara — takes place on Lispenard Street.
Yes. Very bleak but good novel.
“Bartleby, The Scrivener” by Herman Melville takes place on Wall Street, with scenes on Broadway and the Tombs.
Wonderful to see that James Bogardus mentioned Bartelby!
Meant to Be by Emily Griffin, fictional story based on JFK, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy
“Forever” by Pete Hamill. The protagonist lives on Cortlandt St. early in the novel and then on Duane St.
Pete Hamill had lived in Tribeca, in a loft on Walker Street, since buying it in 1999.
Alienist by Caleb Carr
Good novel. Also might have been the disputed origin of a short-lived detective show, “New Amsterdam.”
When I met Pete Hamill at a book signing (in Soho), I mentioned that he had placed his protagonist’s loft at the exact corner where my office is located!
We might just make it after all: my best friendship with Kate Spade
The book talks about how Kate Spade started the company on Warren Street.
Mean Moms by Emma Rosenblum was released this summer and takes place in Tribeca.
BAD TIMING
By Betsy Berne.
Villard
Love in TriBeCa
By turns bracing and breezy, Betsy Berne’s first novel, ”Bad Timing,” which is set in downtown Manhattan, charts an interracial, extramarital affair as seen through eyes of the single, 30-something ”other woman,” a painter disillusioned by moderate success. One night in a bar, this unnamed narrator meets — and later spends the night with — Joseph Pendleton, the charming owner of a popular jazz club, who she knows is married and raising a son. Believing that both she and Joseph ”hailed from the dark side” (though we also come to see her appetite for the lighter side — she writes beauty articles to earn money, watches ”Beverly Hills 90210” reruns and paints her loft entirely pink), the narrator becomes depressed after he gives her the brushoff. Many weeks later, however, she discovers she is pregnant, and after she informs Joseph that she is considering keeping the baby, ”Bad Timing” hits just the right emotional tempo as the two circle and spar. The narrative suffers from a few stereotypes: the fact that Joseph is black inspires the white, Jewish narrator to make an exhausting number of flippant racial remarks; meanwhile, the narrator’s overbearing mother and acerbic gay neighbor are uninspired versions of overly familiar characters. Though the plot proves to be as predictable as affairs with married men tend to be, Berne fully evokes every painful step in this one, as when the narrator first realizes that Joseph’s favorite words to her are ”try, maybe and might” — and yet continues to hope their relationship will somehow work out.
-Megan Harlan, “New York Times” February 25, 2001
I hope it’s okay if I tell everyone about this one: My novella titled Life / Insurance is set in Tribeca and FiDi and other bits of downtown. (I live in FiDi now, used to live in Tribeca.) It’s literary fiction, slightly experimental, a quick read. Published by Regal House. http://www.taradeal.com
In ‘Tis, sequel to Angelas’s ashes, Frank McCourt writes about working in a warehouse on North Moore Street. It was the Merchants House, where I have lived for 28 years.
I believe a few brief bits in Jay Parini’s novel Passages of H.M. have Herman Melville wandering on the waterfront below Canal.
Also parts of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes, about the NY music scene in the mid-1970s.
Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One.
Another good read. The border between safe and zombie zones is Canal Street. Good use of location.
Betsy Berne’s novel “Bad Timing.”
Time and Again by Jack Finney
Thanks for remembering “Time and Again.”
Years ago, when I exited the now-demolished 132 Nassau Street, I had the narrator’s sense of walking into the past, due to the low-rise buildings there and on Beekman Street and Park Row, the bustle of small-business commerce, and the structures of brick and stone versus glass and steel.
Read this time-bending book for a sense of that era.
The Gargoyle Hunters, by John Freeman Gill (who also writes the New York Times Streetscapes column.) A novel about NYC architectural salvage in the 1970s with much action in Tribeca—the theft of an entire historic Manhattan building, and pivotal action atop the Woolworth Building.
Closing Time, A Well-Known Secret, Tribeca Blues, and Hard, Hard City by Jim Fusilli
A mystery series anchored in Tribeca
Brief mentions of Tribeca:
Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight (winner of Pulitzer Prize). Douglass lands in NYC by ferry as a free man (escapee) – there’s a plaque at the marina north of Stuyvesant High School. Makes his way to David Ruggles’s home at 36 Lispenard. Ruggles was a “free black grocer, abolitionist, newspaper editor, and especially the leader of the New York Vigilance Committee…” Ruggles had a reading room and bookstore at 67 Lispenard. Douglass was married at Ruggles’s home.
Everything is Now, The New York 1960s Avant-Garde, by J. Hoberman, describes Yoko Ono’s 112 Chambers Street loft and concerts there.