NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: WALL STREET; Where Suits Are Striped And Stars Come to Sleep

By day, Wall Street still bustles with stockbrokers and other Brooks Brothered figures. But by night, the Street is starting to cash in on a different world, one of bejeweled celebrities and red carpets on a roll. The Regent Wall Street throbs at the center of this new world.

When the Regent opened in 1999 at 55 Wall Street, it was received as yet another elegant hotel but hardly as head-turning as the TriBeCa Grand Hotel or Ian Schrager's Hudson in Midtown. Its cavernous ballroom was favored by Fortune 500 firms, and rented out for corporate hoedowns.

Nowadays, the Regent is the place Liza Minnelli chose for her wedding reception, the place nonprofits hold $1,000-a-plate benefits, senators hold caucuses and movie stars smile for the paparazzi.

''It's become chic to have your events downtown,'' said Anne Livet, an events planner, ''and this is the crown jewel.''

Earlier this month, opening night of the TriBeCa Film Festival, which became a major social event of May, coruscated there, a block from where the opening bell signals the start of trading.

''There were other places,'' said Jane Rosenthal, who founded the film festival with her business partner, Robert De Niro, ''but we wanted everything below Canal Street.''

At 10 that night, a knot of limousines began depositing stars from the premiere of the film ''About a Boy.'' The actors Hugh Grant and Toni Collette, the power couple Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg and countless other familiar faces strolled the red carpet, past a flurry of flashbulbs and beneath a bouquet of American flags.

''It's become a hero's hotel,'' said David Adler, founder of BizBash, an online magazine that covers the events-planning industry. ''So is the Ritz-Carlton, and when the Millenium Hotel reopens, so will that.''

It would be unfair to suggest that the Regent has taken marketing license with its closeness to ground zero, although it did recently hire a bigger public relations firm, Dan Klores Communications. The hotel, after all, turned the same ballroom where stars now eat sushi into a dorm for emergency workers last September -- and absorbed the cost.

''We've always attracted a very sophisticated and well-traveled clientele,'' said Christopher R. J. Knable, the hotel's managing director. ''By virtue of 9/11, it accelerated our profile.''

But the world still seems to be in the process of catching on.

''I've never been here before,'' said Mr. Grant as he dashed from the Regent at midnight and headed north. ''This is a hotel?'' DENNY LEE