Battery up!

Battery Park City had always been one half positive, one half negative.

BPC was nice, certainly. It was quiet. It came with a stunning view of the water. The buildings were eco-friendly. (One-fifth of Manhattan’s LEED-certified residences are in the nabe.) And it came with greenery and good landscaping.

But it was also dismissed by some as too isolated, too antiseptic and too suburban to compete in this gritty metropolis.

In recent months, though, there’s been a surge of restaurants and gourmet markets into Battery Park city — establishing it, finally, as a real neighborhood.

Maggie Allen gave up on the Village and moved to a rental in Battery Park City’s Verdesian (below left)." title="Salvatore Rasa and wife Maggie Allen gave up on the Village and moved to a rental in Battery Park City’s Verdesian (below left)." width="300" height="300" src="/rw/nypost/2012/03/08/home/web_photos/08R.cover1.c.ta--300x300.jpg" />

Christian Johnston(2)

Salvatore Rasa and wife Maggie Allen gave up on the Village and moved to a rental in Battery Park City’s Verdesian (below left).

“We didn’t expect what’s here,” says Salvatore Rasa, who moved to the Verdesian, an eco-friendly rental building at the north end of the neighborhood, three years ago with his wife, Maggie Allen, after spending roughly 30 years in Greenwich Village. “We expected a corporate environment; dull and uninteresting. What we found is really diverse. There are more kids than we thought, more pets than we thought.”

It was always a tall order, getting the necessary commercial venues to make this neighborhood work. For one thing, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of available space. (“There are no remaining sites” available for development, says Lydia Rapillo, vice president of residential leasing at Albanese Organization, one of the pioneer developers in the neighborhood.)

Plus, all the new buildings erected have to be eco-friendly, according to guidelines set by the Battery Park City Authority, which made them slightly more expensive.

But now Danny Meyer has set up shop with not one but three eateries: a Shake Shack (a big hit with the Goldman Sachs crowd, with offices in the adjoining building), a Blue Smoke barbecue joint at 255 Vesey St. and North End Grill, Floyd Cardoz’s high-end restaurant serving up hamachi sashimi and seared diver scallops, at 104 North End Ave.

“It’s fantastic,” says Steve Katz, a resident at another rental in the neighborhood, the Solaire, about North End Grill. “The food is outrageously good.”

Meyer is not alone; pastry whiz Francois Payard is hawking pistachio and passion-fruit macarons at his new bakery across from Shake Shack. Doughnuts from Brooklyn’s Dough and fancy gourmet coffee from Maine’s Coffee by Design are sold at Battery Place Market, the gourmet market that opened last year and did well enough that it opened a second outpost in “Goldman Alley” — the Goldman Sachs complex at 200 West St. Harry’s Italian Pizza Bar is opening a branch, and the Conrad Hotel is also being readied for a launch in Battery Park City.

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Battery Park City, Salvatore Rasa, Battery Park City Authority, Maggie Allen, Goldman Sachs, Battery Park, North End Grill, Danny Meyer

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