Coming up on the nine-month anniversary of its establishment this past July, the Connection is going live with a new and improved website on April. It's all part of a campaign intended, as Baer puts it, "to put Hudson Square on the map, literally." Officially, that area is bounded by West Houston Street on the north, Canal Street on the south, Avenue of the Americas on the east and Greenwich Street on the west. Outside of real estate circles, however, its boundaries are less familiar.
The area is hardly an unknown quantity, especially to the city's creative sector, 30,000 of whom work in the district. "We have new media companies and creative companies of all kinds moving into this district all the time," Baer says. The migration has been in force since the 1980s, when landlords including Trinity Real Estate and Jack Resnick & Sons began converting massive, disused printing facilities into high-quality office space.
Commercial tenants settling here have ranged from architects and interior designers to the likes of the Guggenheim Foundation and Viacom International. The latter leased 394,134 square feet at 345 Hudson St. in 2007, striking Manhattan's fifth-largest leasing deal of that year. Baer observes, "The creative vibe is what in many ways unites us a community."
Hudson Square's creative slant extends to its retail, as well. "While you see a couple of chains along Varick Street, you also see a lot of mom-and-pop retail here," says Baer. "This neighborhood is very receptive to that kind of one-off or two- or three-off retailer. You have a lot of boutique-y type stores coming in, located next door to galleries. I think they'll do very well, not only with the crowd that's here but with the crowd that comes here to go to the Film Forum or S.O.B.'s."
In contrast to other BIDs that have sought to diversify the local employment base, the Connection isn't looking to dilute the creative tenancy in Hudson Square. After all, the slogan "everyone thinks more creatively here" adorns the Trinity Real Estate-sponsored website HudsonSquare.org. "That's our strength, and I always believe in building on strengths," Baer says. Although there continues to be residential growth in the area, the Connection isn't working to make Hudson Square a haven for ground-up apartment towers a la Long Island City.
Nor is the Connection set up to perform some of the basic services of other BIDs. "We do not currently provide supplemental sanitation or security services," says Baer. "When the surveys were done of commercial tenants in the area, people felt it was pretty clean and pretty safe, and it continues to be so."
Of greater concern to commercial tenants, and to the Connection, were improving both the vehicular and pedestrian environment and the variety and number of retailers. "The BID was created to address those issues, and we spent a significant amount of our time reaching out to our tenants and helping them feel connected to the neighborhood," Baer says. "We're also spending our time in physical place-making: how we can create a neighborhood in a physical way, how we can use our streets, how we can improve the east-west connection of a neighborhood that has basically functioned as several north-south corridors leading up to the Holland Tunnel, in order to make this feel like a community and create an identifiable place known as Hudson Square."
The Connection has a budget of $1.7 million and can expand that to $2.5 million if need be. "We have bonding authority, so we have the ability to not only assign but implement significant improvements," says Baer.
A major initiative at the moment is traffic management, for which the BID has hired Eng-Wong, Taub & Associates. "As we look at the grander scheme for improving pedestrian flow and deliveries in the neighborhood, we think there's some low-hanging fruit," Baer says. "There are some things we think are fairly easy to implement with respect to traffic improvements: things like signage, signal changes, better enforcement."
Ultimately, the Connection's goal is to establish connections, both between the district and the surrounding neighborhoods and between businesses within the Hudson Square area. "There really hasn't been a strong voice for the business community before; the individual owners have been their own voices, and very strong voices," says Baer. "We're more of a voice for the neighborhood."
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Paul Bubny
Paul Bubny is managing editor of Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. He has been reporting on business since 1988 and on commercial real estate since 2007. He is based at ALM Real Estate Media Group's offices in New York City.
