CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Aerial view of Hudson Square; 435 Hudson, a Trinity Real Estate property; 375 Hudson, NY heaquarters of Saatchi & Saatchi.

A crowd gathers on the sidewalk, peering through the glass into a studio ready to beam a broadcast live to the city and beyond.

It’s a common sight in Times Square—except that this isn’t Times Square. It’s Hudson Square, an old warehouse district surrounding the Holland Tunnel. And while the new studio and its proprietor, public radio station WNYC, may seem like an odd fit for the neighborhood, it’s not.

So nicknamed by Trinity Real Estate, the area’s biggest landlord, Hudson Square is basically West Soho, but with a more industrial vibe than the trendy section on the other side of Sixth Avenue. Printing businesses called the neighborhood home until heavy manufacturing in the city went out of style in the seventies; in the eighties, creative firms like ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi started to dip their toes into the gritty area, drawn by cheap rents and flexible spaces that had been built big enough to house printing presses.

“What really accelerated the neighborhood’s becoming a media center was the dot-com boom,” says Carl Weisbrod, president of Trinity Real Estate, Trinity Church’s real estate division. “A lot of [start-ups] disappeared after 2001, but more media tenants moved in and helped brand the neighborhood, and now it’s really the creative hub of the city.”

Weisbrod’s not just speaking like a proud parent. Name a branch of the entertainment/media industries that hasn’t set up shop in Hudson Square, be it magazine publishing (Newsweek, New York), television (Viacom), film (the Weinstein Company), book publishing (Penguin, Workman), radio (CBS Radio, WNYC), or PR (publicity giant Edelman will relocate 500 employees to Hudson Street in August).

And it’s not just the rent—which is around half the going rate of Midtown office space in some cases—that’s tempting. “We wanted a big space with light and air, a place the staff would feel comfortable in and excited about,” says Laura Walker, CEO of WNYC. “We just fell in love with the neighborhood—it’s very much us.”

Walker fell so in love that she now chairs the area’s Business Improvement District committee, which will encourage new retail development to serve the neighborhood’s suddenly surging workforce.

“While New York’s creative community is large, everyone knows one another,” says Walker. “Word of mouth brought people down here.”

And if its recent history is any indication, word of mouth will keep Hudson Square growing.