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\n Robert Mango in his ground-floor loft at 178 Duane Street.
\n Photo: Matthew Sedacca\n <\/p>\n
When Rob Mango moved into a loft on Duane Street in 1977, his neighbors were Richard Serra and dairy-and-egg wholesalers with warehouse floors coated in yolks and grime. But in a little over a decade, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Harvey Keitel had arrived. So did the paparazzi swarming to get a shot of JFK Jr., biking around in a suit and Kangol or coming in and out of 20 North Moore. Even the neighborhood\u2019s designation as Tribeca, or \u201cTriBeCa\u201d \u2014 reportedly either the invention of a geographer<\/a> with a loose approach<\/a> to shapes or the result of a newspaper gaffe<\/a> \u2014 was still in its infancy<\/a>. Mango watched from his ground-floor apartment as money poured into the neighborhood in the 1980s<\/a> and \u201990s, transforming the industrial district turned refuge for artists priced out of Soho into an oasis of multimillion-dollar co-op and condo buildings, high-end boutiques, and Michelin-starred restaurants. But before all that, he had to clean a lot of egg goo off his floor.<\/p>\n \n When Mango moved into 178 Duane Street in 1977, he had decades\u2019 worth of egg goo to scrape off the hardwood floors. \n From his loft, Mango has watched Tribeca transform from a refuge for artists priced out of Soho into a hot spot filled with multimillion-dollar apartments and high-end retail boutiques. A couple of months after moving to New York City from Chicago, Mango walked by the five-story neo-Grec building at 178 Duane Street and noticed a \u201cfor rent\u201d sign. At the time, the 26-year-old painter was living on the block with a girlfriend from graduate school and desperate to find a studio with enough room to accommodate his large-format surrealist art. Soho was already too expensive \u2014\u00a0landlords were asking for key money in the five-figures \u2014\u00a0so Mango knew that was a dead end. He called the number on the sign and the owner\u2019s friend, a silversmith named Helga, let him in to see the ground floor that, until recently, had been an auction house and cold storage for the New York Egg Auction. \u201cIt was the exact state that they abandoned it,\u201d he says. \u201cEverything was wrong with it.\u201d The electrical system had to be replaced, and there wasn\u2019t a single radiator or bathroom in the entire space. The tin ceiling was missing several plates, and a hole in a skylight was letting in the rain, which caused the hardwood floors to warp and rot. Then there was the rotten-egg smell. But the space was over 2,300 square feet and the price was right:\u00a0Mango and the landlords, the British Pop artist Peter Gee and an investor named Paul Serra, worked out a deal where he would get the place for free for the first six months in exchange for doing his own renovation work on the apartment and helping out around the building with projects, like installing a door in the basement\u2019s rear exit. After that, it would be $775 a month. \u201cOnly a nut job would think you could turn that into a studio,\u201d Mango tells me. \u201cI was just full of optimism and energy that I could make it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Duane Street was once a hub of dairy-and-egg wholesalers, a number of which were still in business when Mango arrived. Mango started renovating the loft immediately, which, after breaking up with his girlfriend a few months later, also wound up becoming a live-work space. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t the plan,\u201d he says. He woke up at 5:30 most mornings, got a bagel and coffee from Earl Morgan\u2019s deli down the block, and would spend the rest of the day installing lighting or patching the skylight. He sanded down the roughly quarter-inch of the tarlike substance that lined the floorboards, shooting ancient egg dust into the air and burning through dozens of sanding belts in the process. \u201cIt was almost hard to believe that there was wood underneath it,\u201d he says. As for creature comforts, he didn\u2019t add much: a carpeted area underneath the skylight with a few plants hanging from the ceiling, a hot plate in lieu of a proper kitchen, and a bed he built out of plywood with wheels to roll around. In the basement, he built a shower on a platform with a five-gallon bucket underneath to catch the water. \u201cIt was really camping out,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Once Mango finished that day\u2019s renovations, he would begin to work on his paintings. He left his doors open in the summer as an invitation to strangers to come check out his art. At one point, one of those strangers was the developer Jeff Lamb, who, Mango recalls, \u201cdrove this silver Porsche, and had this fantastically beautiful blonde girlfriend.\u201d Lamb was in the middle of converting the former coconut-processing plant at 165 Duane<\/a> into co-ops and offered Mango work as a night watchman. Martin Scorsese, along with his then-wife, Isabella Rossellini, moved into the building and would call Mango at all hours \u2014 including once apparently to scare off a sister-in-law\u2019s rowdy husband. \u201cI would hear from Marty in the middle of the night,\u201d Mango says. \u201cHe was a little paranoid.\u201d The watchman gig led to more work in the building \u2014 including renovating lofts for another developer, Norman Segal<\/a> (\u201cjust an incredible soul\u201d), and Woody Allen\u2019s production designer Mel Bourne<\/a> (\u201ca pain in the ass\u201d) \u2014\u00a0and new patrons for his art. \u201cEvery time I built a loft, the owners would buy my paintings afterward,\u201d Mango says.<\/p>\n \n When Mango first started renovations on his loft, he would wake up around 5:30 and spend his mornings installing new electricity and patching in the ceiling. \n Mango left his loft\u2019s front doors open in the summer, inviting people to come in and check out his large-format surrealist art. By the end of 1981, Mango\u2019s landlords wanted to cash in on the early signs of the neighborhood\u2019s upscaling<\/a>. The New York Times had already published raves about the newly opened Odeon<\/a> and the Mudd Club\u2019s scene-y crowd<\/a>. Young lawyers and Wall Street types were hogging bar seats alongside warehouse workers and artists and beginning to buy up converted lofts, including some he had renovated. After Gee and Serra declined to renew Mango\u2019s lease, he organized with the other tenants at 178 Duane and hired an attorney to fight the eviction proceedings. \u201cHe figured out everything that was wrong with his ownership of the building,\u201d Mango says of the lawyer, \u201cand bought us a lot of time.\u201d\u00a0Residents in other buildings were facing similar issues, leading to the creation of the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants Association. At the meetings, Mango remembers members swapping horror stories while sharing lists of state reps and lawyers they should call. \u201cIt was semi-formal,\u201d he says. The product of their labors: New York\u2019s so-called Loft Law, which passed in 1982 and barred landlords from evicting tenants and introduced rent-stabilization protections for many of these apartments. Mango and his neighbors were shocked at what they had managed to pull off: \u201cWe\u2019re sitting around smiling, like \u2018Do you believe this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n Mango didn\u2019t put in too many creature comforts besides hanging some plants, adding carpeting beneath the patched-up skylight area, and building himself a bed with wheels. Mango\u2019s housing situation started stabilizing just as the rest of his life started falling into place: He met his now-wife, Helen, who at the time was a pressure-suit quality-control inspector, in 1982, after she came by the loft with a mutual friend. The pair began dating soon after, and Mango started improving the space\u00a0\u2014 building a kitchen in place of a hot plate with pieces of countertop and shower tile he reclaimed from a building he was renovating, getting a table to replace the cable spool he\u2019d been eating off. \u201cA woman is not going to have anything to do with a place like this,\u201d he remembers thinking. The basement bathroom that he had been using since moving in was especially grim, so he installed a proper one in his loft. Eventually, he even got a washer and dryer. \u201cI started turning it into a home,\u201d he says. The couple had their first child, Magdalena, on New Year\u2019s Day in 1986, and Mango got to work baby-proofing the home. He converted his sanding room in the middle of the apartment \u2014 a hub of sawdust, sparks, and power tools \u2014\u00a0into a nursery with a crib. Their son, Joey, was born a few years later, at which point Mango ended up building a double-bunk bed. \u201cIt was beautiful,\u201d he says of the kids\u2019 room. Above the bathroom area, he used a yawning gap in the 12-foot ceilings to build a playroom with crisscrossing wood slats overlooking the kitchen that allowed Mango and his wife to keep tabs while making dinner or when friends came over. \u201cWe could see them and they could see us,\u201d he says. As for his studio space? That was relegated to the basement, where the unacceptably bleak bathroom stood.<\/p>\n \n After Mango started dating his now-wife, Helen, he jumped on improving the space, with more renovations following the births of their children. \n He also brought his art studio downstairs to prevent the kids getting into any accidents. Robert De Niro and Drew Nieporent opened the Tribeca Grill in 1990 on the ground floor of the actor\u2019s Tribeca Film Center, drawing<\/a> Eddie Murphy, Spike Lee and Cyndi Lauper down to Greenwich Street. Four years later, De Niro and Nieporent convinced Nobu Matsuhisa to open his first namesake restaurant on Hudson Street, where JFK Jr. became a regular<\/a> after moving into his $700,000 two-bedroom penthouse<\/a> at 20 North Moore. A contested rezoning of the former manufacturing hub in 1995 ushered in a flood of new retail<\/a>, construction<\/a>, and condo conversions, all of which were a magnet for young parents who could be spotted with their strollers at the Washington Market School or browsing Wyeth for mid-century-modern pieces<\/a> to furnish their $750,000 lofts<\/a>. \u201cSuddenly, there\u2019s cutesy women\u2019s clothing shops and more five-star restaurants,\u201d Mango says. \u201cThe cost and value went through the roof.\u201d<\/p>\n Not that Mango wasn\u2019t\u00a0changing, too. He coached his daughter\u2019s Little League team and put her in swimming classes at the Downtown Athletic Club. \u201cThe dads who became the coaches, we had to clear the field, get the rocks out,\u201d he says. It was also around this time that the neighborhood had picked up<\/a> a nickname: \u201cTriburbia.\u201d The loft was entering a new phase of its own: In 2001, Mango knocked down the walls to reveal the building\u2019s original brickwork, along with intact copies of the New York Times from the 1890s and Depression-era cigarette packs. He tore down the kitchen he had built using scraps from other jobs and put in something a little more grown-up, with a range hood and a brick-red breakfast bar. The kids by then were old enough to want their own rooms, so he took out the nursery to further open up the living area. \u201cIt went from being just kind of a ticky-tacky loft situation that I had evolved over the first 24 years and into a pretty good living space,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \n In 2001, Mango replaced the kitchen he built with scraps from other construction jobs with something a little more grown-up. On the morning of September 11, soot and debris from the collapsing World Trade Center crashed into Mango\u2019s home through the loft\u2019s skylight. \u201cEverything was covered with gray dust, and a lot of it was hanging in the air,\u201d he says. It was a scary and uncertain time. Helen and the kids fled for upstate in their station wagon, while Mango and the family cat, Puss Puss, stayed behind. Never, though, did he consider moving out of the city. \u201cI\u2019m way too much of a badass to run,\u201d he says. If anything, it strengthened his resolve to stay. A lot of his neighbors felt this way, too. The attacks bonded people across the parts of lower Manhattan that had been hit hardest. It felt like everyone was invested, in an almost defiant way, in the project of bringing the neighborhood back. De Niro, Scorsese, and Jane Rosenthal organized the Tribeca Film Festival as an injection of glamour and culture. Investments continued to pour in, and the development boom that had taken hold in the \u201990s picked right back up again. Per data<\/a> from the city, lower Manhattan saw its population and housing increase by nearly a quarter in the first half of the decade after 9\/11 \u2014\u00a0significantly outpacing the rest of Manhattan. And a lot of Mango\u2019s new neighbors had money to burn. By 2006, Tribeca had become<\/a> the most expensive Zip code in the five boroughs. \u201cThe wealth was showing up,\u201d he says. \u201cLimos and Hollywood types going to the Tribeca Film Festival. It was like, \u2018Are you fucking kidding me?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n On 9\/11, debris came crashing into his home through the skylight, which was in the middle of the renovation and missing its glass panes. The tarry egg grime has long faded from the floors of 178 Duane. But Mango and his family\u2019s loft have become relics of the neighborhood. \u201cNot many people live in the same place for 50 years,\u201d he says. He doesn\u2019t mind his elder-statesman status, though: \u201cThe only interesting people are the old-timers.\u201d Mango and his wife, for their part, have settled into quieter routines in their older age. Three days a week, the front of the loft becomes Helen\u2019s Pilates studio. Mango, meanwhile, has continued to make his art in the basement, most recently the portrait of an NFL linebacker, Dick Butkus. But Mango\u2019s landlord died last month, and it\u2019s unclear what his wife\u2019s plans are for the building. There\u2019s definitely an air of uncertainty, but Mango has been there before. He\u2019s still preparing for the future, and he believes it\u2019s a future of staying put. \u201cI\u2019m not going anywhere,\u201d he says. \u201cThe rest is up to God.\u201d<\/p>\n Got a good story about how you got your apartment? Email me at: matthew.sedacca@nymag.com.<\/p>\n Photo: Kevin Noble\n <\/p>\n Rent: $2,500<\/p>\n Location: 178 Duane Street<\/p>\n Years Lived There: 49 years<\/p>\n Noteworthy renovations: He transformed what was once his daughter\u2019s bedroom into a \u201cTuscan villa\u201d for his wife, in part by angling the ceiling with wood reclaimed from a Philadelphia barn to channel \u201can old Italian interior.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c5d261f803bf07e7d73bd926057db94a4e-IMG-4029.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Matthew Sedacca\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/3f06e6ca85a5ced693310def52b75d072c-Rob-Mango-Studio-6.rhorizontal.w700.png\")
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\n Photo: Kevin Noble\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/e555fc37eb2b13fbc4abed1a73da59fbc1-IMG-4043.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of Robert Mango\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/8f404a7f838a8352ab2992df9d7c8994f4-IMG-4048.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of Robert Mango\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/9249a4ec4845c2755dcfda642d5ee6ee3e-IMG-4047.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of Robert Mango\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/54f641679533ac7192958cc35e83b68443-IMG-4051.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of Robert Mango\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/7afb7bc8e2b6b2a3c05cd4cf226dd57d2e-IMG-4045.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of Robert Mango\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/9006c6b9cf905c818669b955d1739640e5-Rob-Mango-Studio-3-.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Kevin Noble\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2ac448e640d0252fc47d12c37fc9f927d4-IMG-4058.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Matthew Sedacca\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/11c500205298627091187c2934e675e13e-Rob-Mango-Studio-4-.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Kevin Noble\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/123ee82bd66bffde6b9cb1068c914dbbb3-Rob-Mango-Studio-7.rhorizontal.w700.png\")
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