What Does FiDi Stand For? (And Where It Starts and Stops)

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FiDi stands for the Financial District, the neighborhood at the southern tip of Manhattan around Wall Street and the harbor.

FiDi is short for Financial District. It's a nickname, not an official designation, and it follows the same pattern as SoHo (south of Houston) and Tribeca (triangle below Canal). You'll see it in rental listings, on restaurant pages and in the way people down here actually talk. Nobody says "I live in the Financial District" twice in one conversation.

Where it is. The southern end of Manhattan. Battery Park and the harbor are the bottom edge, the Hudson and the East River are the sides, and the top edge is fuzzy but generally lands somewhere around Chambers Street, where Tribeca and City Hall take over. If you're standing on Wall Street, you're in FiDi. If you're standing at the Brooklyn Bridge entrance, you're at its northeast corner.

Is it the same as Lower Manhattan? Not quite. Lower Manhattan is the broader term and includes Tribeca, Battery Park City, the Seaport and sometimes Chinatown. FiDi is the piece in the middle, the old streets around Wall Street and Broadway.

What's in it. More than the name suggests. The New York Stock Exchange and the Charging Bull, One World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial, Trinity Church, Federal Hall, South Street Seaport on the East River side, and Stone Street, a cobbled block lined with restaurants. The ferry terminals at the bottom of the island run to Staten Island, Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty. The street grid up in Midtown is a grid; down here it's the original crooked colonial layout, which is why walking directions feel strange for the first day.

What it's like now. It's residential, which surprises people. Plenty of the old office towers were converted to apartments, so alongside the suits you get families, dogs and grocery runs. Weekdays it's busy with the office crowd. Weekends it's quiet in a way almost nowhere else in Manhattan is, and that's the best time to walk it.

We're at 17 John Street, in the middle of all of it. Wall Street is two blocks away and the ferry terminal is about a five-minute walk.