Boomtown WTC

With development booming, and media companies like Condé Nast starting to populate the area’s skyscrapers, Lower Manhattan’s Neil Patrick Harris-like image turnaround seems to be in full swing. … “It’s beyond our wildest dreams,” said Peter Poulakakos, a restaurant entrepreneur who has invested in this swath of downtown since 1999. It has gone from sliding toward becoming a ghost town, he said, to “a neighborhood that competes with all the major developing cities in the world.”

Those big names will be showing up with their gold-prospecting gear only to find that early adopters like Danny Meyer, Andrew Carmellini and Stephen Starr have already set up camp. They built restaurants in anticipation of a growth spurt, and since Condé Nast started moving into 1 World Trade Center in November, they’ve been adjusting their menus and schedules to fit the eating habits of editors from Vogue and GQ. The Odeon has added a breakfast service. Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, Dan Peres of Details, Pilar Guzmán of Condé Nast Traveler and Michael Hainey of GQ can be spotted there on a regular basis, commanding tables or phone-tapping privately at the bar.

It would perhaps be a mistake for the proprietors beginning to profit from the boomtown that has emerged in the shadow of the World Trade Center to think that people who currently comprise their new customer base — who seem to be drawn largely from the media, according to the media, anyway — will necessarily dominate the composition or tenor of the neighborhood in the coming years. Conde Nast has about thirty-five hundred employees occupying floors twenty through forty-four of One World Trade Center — out of seventy-eight floors designated for office use — and Time Inc. is bringing a little (or a lot?) less than three thousand employees to Brookfield Place later this fall, a fraction of the people who will be working (and living!) in the area.

Maybe think of the media companies and their employees as first-wave gentrifiers; a richer, more robust wave is just around the corner, and those people are far less likely to be permanently diminished or crushed out of existence if there’s a major dip in the ad market. Gotta think long term, you know?