When Rob Mango moved into a loft on Duane Street in 1977, his neighbors were Richard Serra and dairy-and-egg wholesalers with warehouse floors coated in yolks and grime. But in a little over a decade, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Harvey Keitel had arrived. So did the paparazzi swarming to get a shot of JFK Jr., biking around in a suit and Kangol or coming in and out of 20 North Moore. Even the neighborhood’s designation as Tribeca, or “TriBeCa” — reportedly either the invention of a geographer with a loose approach to shapes or the result of a newspaper gaffe — was still in its infancy. Mango watched from his ground-floor apartment as money poured into the neighborhood in the 1980s and ’90s, transforming the industrial district turned refuge for artists priced out of Soho into an oasis of multimillion-dollar co-op and condo buildings, high-end boutiques, and Michelin-starred restaurants. But before all that, he had to clean a lot of egg goo off his floor.
Priced out of Soho and looking for an artist studio
A couple of months after moving to New York City from Chicago, Mango walked by the five-story neo-Grec building at 178 Duane Street and noticed a “for rent” sign. At the time, the 26-year-old painter was living on the block with a girlfriend from graduate school and desperate to find a studio with enough room to accommodate his large-format surrealist art. Soho was already too expensive — landlords were asking for key money in the five-figures — so Mango knew that was a dead end. He called the number on the sign and the owner’s friend, a silversmith named Helga, let him in to see the ground floor that, until recently, had been an auction house and cold storage for the New York Egg Auction. “It was the exact state that they abandoned it,” he says. “Everything was wrong with it.” The electrical system had to be replaced, and there wasn’t a single radiator or bathroom in the entire space. The tin ceiling was missing several plates, and a hole in a skylight was letting in the rain, which caused the hardwood floors to warp and rot. Then there was the rotten-egg smell. But the space was over 2,300 square feet and the price was right: Mango and the landlords, the British Pop artist Peter Gee and an investor named Paul Serra, worked out a deal where he would get the place for free for the first six months in exchange for doing his own renovation work on the apartment and helping out around the building with projects, like installing a door in the basement’s rear exit. After that, it would be $775 a month. “Only a nut job would think you could turn that into a studio,” Mango tells me. “I was just full of optimism and energy that I could make it.”
Making it a livable loft
Mango started renovating the loft immediately, which, after breaking up with his girlfriend a few months later, also wound up becoming a live-work space. “It wasn’t the plan,” he says. He woke up at 5:30 most mornings, got a bagel and coffee from Earl Morgan’s deli down the block, and would spend the rest of the day installing lighting or patching the skylight. He sanded down the roughly quarter-inch of the tarlike substance that lined the floorboards, shooting ancient egg dust into the air and burning through dozens of sanding belts in the process. “It was almost hard to believe that there was wood underneath it,” he says. As for creature comforts, he didn’t add much: a carpeted area underneath the skylight with a few plants hanging from the ceiling, a hot plate in lieu of a proper kitchen, and a bed he built out of plywood with wheels to roll around. In the basement, he built a shower on a platform with a five-gallon bucket underneath to catch the water. “It was really camping out,” he says.
Once Mango finished that day’s renovations, he would begin to work on his paintings. He left his doors open in the summer as an invitation to strangers to come check out his art. At one point, one of those strangers was the developer Jeff Lamb, who, Mango recalls, “drove this silver Porsche, and had this fantastically beautiful blonde girlfriend.” Lamb was in the middle of converting the former coconut-processing plant at 165 Duane into co-ops and offered Mango work as a night watchman. Martin Scorsese, along with his then-wife, Isabella Rossellini, moved into the building and would call Mango at all hours — including once apparently to scare off a sister-in-law’s rowdy husband. “I would hear from Marty in the middle of the night,” Mango says. “He was a little paranoid.” The watchman gig led to more work in the building — including renovating lofts for another developer, Norman Segal (“just an incredible soul”), and Woody Allen’s production designer Mel Bourne (“a pain in the ass”) — and new patrons for his art. “Every time I built a loft, the owners would buy my paintings afterward,” Mango says.
Fighting to stay (and changing the law in the process)
By the end of 1981, Mango’s landlords wanted to cash in on the early signs of the neighborhood’s upscaling. The New York Times had already published raves about the newly opened Odeon and the Mudd Club’s scene-y crowd. Young lawyers and Wall Street types were hogging bar seats alongside warehouse workers and artists and beginning to buy up converted lofts, including some he had renovated. After Gee and Serra declined to renew Mango’s lease, he organized with the other tenants at 178 Duane and hired an attorney to fight the eviction proceedings. “He figured out everything that was wrong with his ownership of the building,” Mango says of the lawyer, “and bought us a lot of time.” Residents in other buildings were facing similar issues, leading to the creation of the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants Association. At the meetings, Mango remembers members swapping horror stories while sharing lists of state reps and lawyers they should call. “It was semi-formal,” he says. The product of their labors: New York’s so-called Loft Law, which passed in 1982 and barred landlords from evicting tenants and introduced rent-stabilization protections for many of these apartments. Mango and his neighbors were shocked at what they had managed to pull off: “We’re sitting around smiling, like ‘Do you believe this?’”
Domesticating the feral loft
Mango’s housing situation started stabilizing just as the rest of his life started falling into place: He met his now-wife, Helen, who at the time was a pressure-suit quality-control inspector, in 1982, after she came by the loft with a mutual friend. The pair began dating soon after, and Mango started improving the space — building a kitchen in place of a hot plate with pieces of countertop and shower tile he reclaimed from a building he was renovating, getting a table to replace the cable spool he’d been eating off. “A woman is not going to have anything to do with a place like this,” he remembers thinking. The basement bathroom that he had been using since moving in was especially grim, so he installed a proper one in his loft. Eventually, he even got a washer and dryer. “I started turning it into a home,” he says. The couple had their first child, Magdalena, on New Year’s Day in 1986, and Mango got to work baby-proofing the home. He converted his sanding room in the middle of the apartment — a hub of sawdust, sparks, and power tools — into a nursery with a crib. Their son, Joey, was born a few years later, at which point Mango ended up building a double-bunk bed. “It was beautiful,” he says of the kids’ room. Above the bathroom area, he used a yawning gap in the 12-foot ceilings to build a playroom with crisscrossing wood slats overlooking the kitchen that allowed Mango and his wife to keep tabs while making dinner or when friends came over. “We could see them and they could see us,” he says. As for his studio space? That was relegated to the basement, where the unacceptably bleak bathroom stood.
Entering “Triburbia”
Robert De Niro and Drew Nieporent opened the Tribeca Grill in 1990 on the ground floor of the actor’s Tribeca Film Center, drawing Eddie Murphy, Spike Lee and Cyndi Lauper down to Greenwich Street. Four years later, De Niro and Nieporent convinced Nobu Matsuhisa to open his first namesake restaurant on Hudson Street, where JFK Jr. became a regular after moving into his $700,000 two-bedroom penthouse at 20 North Moore. A contested rezoning of the former manufacturing hub in 1995 ushered in a flood of new retail, construction, and condo conversions, all of which were a magnet for young parents who could be spotted with their strollers at the Washington Market School or browsing Wyeth for mid-century-modern pieces to furnish their $750,000 lofts. “Suddenly, there’s cutesy women’s clothing shops and more five-star restaurants,” Mango says. “The cost and value went through the roof.”
Not that Mango wasn’t changing, too. He coached his daughter’s Little League team and put her in swimming classes at the Downtown Athletic Club. “The dads who became the coaches, we had to clear the field, get the rocks out,” he says. It was also around this time that the neighborhood had picked up a nickname: “Triburbia.” The loft was entering a new phase of its own: In 2001, Mango knocked down the walls to reveal the building’s original brickwork, along with intact copies of the New York Times from the 1890s and Depression-era cigarette packs. He tore down the kitchen he had built using scraps from other jobs and put in something a little more grown-up, with a range hood and a brick-red breakfast bar. The kids by then were old enough to want their own rooms, so he took out the nursery to further open up the living area. “It went from being just kind of a ticky-tacky loft situation that I had evolved over the first 24 years and into a pretty good living space,” he says.
“Everything was covered with gray dust”
On the morning of September 11, soot and debris from the collapsing World Trade Center crashed into Mango’s home through the loft’s skylight. “Everything was covered with gray dust, and a lot of it was hanging in the air,” he says. It was a scary and uncertain time. Helen and the kids fled for upstate in their station wagon, while Mango and the family cat, Puss Puss, stayed behind. Never, though, did he consider moving out of the city. “I’m way too much of a badass to run,” he says. If anything, it strengthened his resolve to stay. A lot of his neighbors felt this way, too. The attacks bonded people across the parts of lower Manhattan that had been hit hardest. It felt like everyone was invested, in an almost defiant way, in the project of bringing the neighborhood back. De Niro, Scorsese, and Jane Rosenthal organized the Tribeca Film Festival as an injection of glamour and culture. Investments continued to pour in, and the development boom that had taken hold in the ’90s picked right back up again. Per data from the city, lower Manhattan saw its population and housing increase by nearly a quarter in the first half of the decade after 9/11 — significantly outpacing the rest of Manhattan. And a lot of Mango’s new neighbors had money to burn. By 2006, Tribeca had become the most expensive Zip code in the five boroughs. “The wealth was showing up,” he says. “Limos and Hollywood types going to the Tribeca Film Festival. It was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’”
Living in the same place for (almost) 50 years
The tarry egg grime has long faded from the floors of 178 Duane. But Mango and his family’s loft have become relics of the neighborhood. “Not many people live in the same place for 50 years,” he says. He doesn’t mind his elder-statesman status, though: “The only interesting people are the old-timers.” Mango and his wife, for their part, have settled into quieter routines in their older age. Three days a week, the front of the loft becomes Helen’s Pilates studio. Mango, meanwhile, has continued to make his art in the basement, most recently the portrait of an NFL linebacker, Dick Butkus. But Mango’s landlord died last month, and it’s unclear what his wife’s plans are for the building. There’s definitely an air of uncertainty, but Mango has been there before. He’s still preparing for the future, and he believes it’s a future of staying put. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “The rest is up to God.”
Got a good story about how you got your apartment? Email me at: matthew.sedacca@nymag.com.
