Excerpted below is a Sept. 11 New York Times article that reports the latest plans for commercial development by Trinity Real Estate and Square Mile Capital Management of a vacant eight-story warehouse on Hudson Street, between Charlton and Vandam in Manhattan, once the beating heart of New York City's traditional printing industry. The $220 million building will feature high-end shops, office space and a luxury hotel. Construction is expected to begin shortly.

"...From the 1920s through the 1980s, the surrounding neighborhood hummed with the sounds of printing presses and the smell of ink. But in the late 1990s, Trinity Church, the largest landlord in the area with 14 buildings, made a concerted effort to convert the factories into office space. Across the street from Trinity’s eight-story warehouse is 345 Hudson Street, a nearly 1 million-square-foot building that now houses MTV, CBS Radio, the Guggenheim Foundation, Penguin Putnam Publishers, In Demand and the Weinstein movie company.

“Printers’ hangouts like Renato’s on Vandam and the Printer’s Pub at 480 Canal Street are long gone. And the church has named the area north of Canal Street and east of Varick Street ‘Hudson Square’ to give the neighborhood a greater sense of panache.

“The same trend has unfolded in the now chic meatpacking district and in the garment district to the north and in TriBeCa to the south, as the last remnants of Manhattan’s manufacturing districts succumb to foreign competition, rising rents and the unrelenting pace of luxury development...."

It’s worth remembering that once upon a time, Trinity Real Estate, a subsidiary of the Parish of Trinity Church, owned more than five million square feet of manufacturing space in several buildings located in the Hudson Street/Tribeca/West Village district, most of it occupied by printers in the mid-70s. Beginning in the late 80s, however, Trinity lost roughly 2.5 million square feet of its printing tenancy because of the financial failures of some struggling graphic arts occupants, prompting its 1998 decision not to renew the leases or to significantly raise the rents for most of its printing tenants at 11 manufacturing sites on Varick, Hudson and Canal Streets and the Avenue of the Americas, and to convert millions of square feet of industrial space to commercial use. The move sent shock waves through traditional printing enclaves clustered in and around lower Manhattan. Scores of firms unable to cope with the likely loss of accounts or to bear the expense of relocation, simply closed. Others were forced to move to neighboring boroughs, upstate, or out of state altogether, where rent and utility rates were lower. For the past several years, printing tenants in most Trinity buildings have given way to non-manufacturing businesses like publishing houses and ad agencies, photography and design studios, and luxury development. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, whose anniversary passed while many of us were celebrating a resurgent industry at this week's Graph Expo - exactly where we were six years ago when those events occurred - compounded the damage.

Reports of the Manhattan industry’s imminent demise proved exaggerated, however. Bloody but unbowed, Manhattan's albeit leaner printing industry today continues to function as a linchpin of the NY metro region's print market, which supports nearly 5,700 establishments, 138,000 employees, and generates some $13.7 billion in printing shipments annually, according to Printing Industries of America's 2006 Print Atlas.