Karl Taro Greenfeld’s novel ‘Triburbia’ tells how artistic Tribeca fell prey to wealthy Wall Street types
Story centers on a group of fathers who meet for coffee, and some of them seem to resemble real Tribeca denizens
BY SHERRYL CONNELLY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
BRYAN SMITH/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The new novel “Triburbia” maps an intersection in time in Tribeca. It’s 2008, and the creative types who’d claimed the nabe from actual artists watch as the hedge fund millionaires invade. In a shaky economy, the holdouts from an earlier era have only their cultural pretensions to protect them.
“The bankers and lawyers here now don’t even pretend to care about theater and literature,” says author Karl Taro Greenfeld, who lives at Warren St. and West Broadway. “The people they’re replacing at least fancied themselves as being part of the creative class.”
Greenfeld’s story centers on a group of fathers who form a coffee klatsch that meets mornings at Socrates, the now-shuttered Greek diner on Hudson St. The cast includes a sound engineer with his own business, a sculptor supported by his wife, a one-hit playwright, a film producer seemingly always between projects, a best-selling memoirist exposed as a fraud and, oh, a gangster.
It’s hardly an affectionate portrait of the neighbors, though it is funny. Does Greenfeld expect any blowback from, say, the actual coffee klatsch of fathers he meets with many mornings? Or chef David Bouley or memoirist James Frey, both of whom are figures in the neighborhood?
“No, no,” he says hastily.
“These aren’t their stories. Though Frey does live in Tribeca.”