Rendering of the facade by Oved Group One New York City cultural establishment is planning for a transformation and an addition. Developers Oved Group and Nexus Building Development Group are giving Little Italy’s Italian American Museum a residential addition.

20 Exchange Place's stylized facade with architectural grotesques. Even though it boasts one of the most distinctive skylines in the world, Manhattan didn't get that way over night. One of its most cherished pre-war architectural styles, Art Deco, is well-represented with distinguished examples such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. These Financial District luxury rentals offer pre-war flair with plenty of modern conveniences.

Manhattan’s Financial District has a rich history as the nation’s center of commerce. While this undeniable status remains true, this Lower Manhattan neighborhood is slowly regaining a reputation for luxury residential apartments. This five luxury buildings in particular feature some of Manhattan’s most stunning residences, and are among the neighborhood’s priciest.

Full of creative celebrities and lined with Manhattan’s last remaining cobblestone streets — not to mention a world-renowned film festival — Tribeca’s luxury rentals offer plenty of style in one of the city’s coolest neighborhoods.

Here’s another sign that the Financial District is moving away from being a strictly business territory and becoming an in-demand residential community: a new 30-story mixed-use building is going to rise up soon at the corner of Nassau and Ann streets in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood. The new building, which is being developed by Ann/Nassau Realty and designed by SLCE Architects, will be ready for occupancy by the first quarter of 2014.

City Comptroller John Liu released a report last Wednesday stating that rising rents are increasingly putting pressure on middle-class families. The new report showed that half of all city households typically spend more than 30% of their income on rent alone, compared to 26% nationally. Rent becomes officially unaffordable when it goes over 30%, according to federal benchmarks. Middle-income apartment renters, defined as people earning between $35,000 and $75,000 annually, face the most pressure in Manhattan, where 45% pay rent that falls into the officially unaffordable bracket. This high rent is unfortunately not unique to Manhattan apartments however. Rents have also been creeping up in Staten Island and Queens, where 44% of the middle-class residents are shouldering unaffordable housing costs.

Everyone knows that living in Manhattan is expensive, especially when renting an apartment. While this is true in general, there are exceptions to the rule. Manhattan Valley, an unassuming, quiet neighborhood with a convenient location situated between 100th and 110th Street and bounded by Broadway and Central Park West, has many rental apartments available for prices far below the norm for Manhattan and the neighboring Upper West Side. This neighborhood has had trouble garnering attention among renters of luxury apartments in Manhattan, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve recognition. Manhattan Valley is something of a throwback: A community oriented neighborhood that hasn’t undergone the kind of gentrification that homogenizes neighborhoods and destroys their character. As such, this unique area has some of the best deals in Manhattan, especially considering that many of the rental apartments are condo-quality. And for families or young professionals who don’t mind having roommates, the prices for 2-bedroom and 3-bedroom apartments are astoundingly low.

Since a renaming campaign that began in over 50 years ago, some things have officially come off the menu in Hell’s Kitchen—grit and squalor, gang bivouacs, dire poverty. In 1959, the Manhattan neighborhood stretching from 34th to 59th Street west of 8th Avenue attempted an image makeover when grisly gang violence took the life of two young boys and generated waves of negative media coverage. That year it was alternatively named Clinton—but not unanimously.  Artists and residents in the community have argued name-politics since the beginning. Where HK has a plucky cachet, Clinton rolls of the tongue with glass sterility. Is the neighborhood a niche for Bohemians, or young urban professionals? Is graffiti art or blight? Are high-rises the future? Technical name grumbling still fills the air, but any stroll through the warehouse-y neighborhood will reveal a juxtaposition of both worlds.

For many years, cries of “fresh fish!”, shouted by fish-mongers plying their wares, were far more prevalent than residents within Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. But since 2005, with the re-location of the Fulton Fish Market to Hunts Point, that paradigm has become obsolete, as many Manhattanites find themselves choosing to rent luxury apartments within this historic district. To be sure, there has been a changing atmosphere in the area dating back to the late 1970s, but since 2005 the rate of transformation has rapidly increased, perhaps representing the beginning of a new trend within Manhattan real estate.