BIG CHANGES, LITTLE ITALY

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BIG CHANGES, LITTLE ITALY

By LISA KEYS

Though it's easy to mock the alphabet soup of new New York City neighborhoods, many of the monikers make sense. SoHo, after all, stands for "South of Houston," and the more recent nickname DUMBO fittingly means "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass."

But what to call a little corner of Manhattan that's roughly bordered by Lafayette Street to the west, Houston to the north, the Bowery to the east and Canal Street to the south?

Maps usually label this parcel as Little Italy, a remnant of the time when nearly 100 percent of the population here was Italian. Enterprising real-estate brokers in recent years dubbed the northern, upscale swath of the nabe NoLita - North of Little Italy, get it? But now that Little Italy's dwindled to a few blocks, what do you call this mongrel of a neighborhood, where boutiques mix with Chinese produce shops and old-school pizzerias?

Here's a suggestion: hot, hot, hot. As new housing rises downtown, wide swaths of greater Little Italy - or, if you prefer, SoLita, NotLI or Curbed.com's nomme de nabe, Little Chitaly - are seeing unprecedented residential development. In an area dominated by prewar walk-ups, a spate of new projects are under construction, from small condominiums to the super-luxury 123 Baxter St., a seven-story condo with its much-touted robotic parking garage.

"SoHo has expanded a lot," says Lisa Maysonet, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, who is marketing 123 Baxter. "To me, this is kind of a SoHo South, or a SoHo East. It's trendy, and yet it still feels rich in culture. And we don't have a Starbucks yet."

"It's a trendy, more neighborhoody version of SoHo," says Ross Clark, a 24-year-old music publicist who has lived at Spring and Elizabeth streets since August 2004. "You have all the restaurants, bars and shops, but it's on a smaller scale. It's not as crowded."

Clark lives in the upscale NoLita section of the 'hood, an area laden with hip caf,s and Mary-Kate Olsen sightings.

"I don't think my neighborhood is up-and-coming anymore - I think it's established," he says, noting the recent opening of a Ralph Lauren store down the street. "Once you have Ralph Lauren, you're pretty established. My dry cleaner used to be there."

And yet, the more things change in the neighborhood, the more they stay the same. Writer Tom Cregan has lived on Mulberry Street for four years, on a block that boasts Umberto's Clam House and a Qi Gong parlor.

"It's Little Italy," says Cregan, 38. "Well, it's 'Chinatown, in parentheses, Little Italy.' The Italian food shops are still there, and the restaurants are still there.

"You still have little old ladies sitting out on folding lawn chairs; there's people playing Pinochle in the park on Mulberry and Spring," he adds. "There's still a tradition."

In addition to buying his pasta at Piemonte Home Made Ravioli on Grand Street, Cregan proudly keeps a Little Italy tradition of his own, too: His home is a fifth-floor walk-up in a tenement building.

"There's no luxury here," he says.

It's a phenomenon that's plagued the neighborhood for years. "Everyone says they want to live in NoLita, but you take them to something and they're completely underwhelmed," says Elizabeth Sheehan of Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy. "The units are asking West Village prices, and they may have nice views and stuff, but they're old.

"There's prewar charm, and then there's prewar I've got a lot of work to do," she adds.

"You're not going to find a lot of true lofts in NoLita," says Citi Habitats' Jon Cella, contrasting the neighborhood with the prime SoHo streets just a few blocks west. "It's a comparable price for a different type of space."

Increasingly, however, there are new options in the nabe.

Along the Bowery, on Little Italy's eastern fringe, new condos are sprouting like a five o'clock shadow. And on the western border, One Kenmare Square, the much-publicized condo designed by Andre Balazs and Richard Gluckman looms large and luxurious. In the middle are numerous new condo constructions and conversions that tend to sell quickly.

"There's no question, the demand is definitely there," says Mark Kennedy of Prudential Douglas Elliman. "The problem is the shortage of housing stock."

For example, in the spring, Kennedy had a listing for a large Spring Street condo priced in the low seven figures. Judging from the multiple offers for the listing, "It was obvious that there hadn't been anything on the market in a long time," Kennedy says.

The lucky buyers? Lisa Rubisch and Ian Kerner, who fell in love with the condo at first sight. Once the couple heard there were multiple bids on the apartment, they decamped to Lombardi's - the local pizza joint that recently celebrated its 100th-year anniversary - to strategize.

Rubisch, a director of commercials and music videos, refused to lose out on the apartment. "I was like a dog with a bone," she says. (Rubisch wrote the sellers a letter pleading her case. The tactic worked.)

"I grew up on the Upper West Side and I watched it become Gap after Starbucks after Banana Republic," says Kerner, a sex therapist and author, most recently of "He Comes Next." "Everything here is small, independent; the bookstores, caf,s. That's what I love the most."

"Yes, it's a hipster haven, but you still have Little Italy and Chinatown influences," adds Rubisch. "It feels very old-school and special."

"The beautiful thing is that it hasn't changed that much," says broker Maysonet of the blocks surrounding 123 Baxter. "That's what makes it appealing. There are certain kinds of people who would really like it - just not Park Avenue people."

Still, with its mutt-like blend of new and old, ethnic and upscale, confusion reigns about what the Neighborhood Formerly Known As Little Italy should rightly be called. Take the Web site for Hester Gardens, a 61-unit building at the corner of Hester and Mott streets that's 75 percent sold since hitting the market in October. The condo, the site says, is "located at the border of Little Italy and Chinatown, and surrounded by SoHo, TriBeCa, NoLita and the L.E.S."

Broker Shin Wah Yeung laughs when asked to name the building's neighborhood. Though he thinks the "border" tag is fitting, "A lot of people still consider it very much Chinatown," he says.

"It's all very subjective," he adds, noting the condo has been considered SoHo, too. "It's an issue of where the borders are - or whether or not there are any borders at this point."