Moving on to Modern
From her new TriBeCa flat, a homeowner has views of a different river
One fine morning, after 27 years in the Upper East Side apartment where she'd raised two now-grown sons, Felice Axelrod woke up and said "Enough." She surveyed the classic rooms built by Rosario Candela, Manhattan's premier residential architect of the 1920s -- and initially decorated for her by designer to the social stars Mario Buatta -- and thought, "I want new. I want modern."
Being a woman brimming with energy and more organized than most of us (witness the scores of corporate events she plans each year as vice-president of a famous financial firm), she zipped straight downtown to TriBeCa to look at apartments. It's one of the restless city's trendiest resurrected neighborhoods, and its history reaches back to Dutch farmsteads in the 1600s and British mansions a century later. Commerce and shipping came to dominate the area, but by the 1960s nobody lived in "the triangle below Canal Street." Enter the artists -- always the urban pioneers -- followed, predictably, by people with money and avant-garde tastes. After all, Wall Street is within easy walking distance, and neighbors include Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep as well as thousands of kids in stylish prams.
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