80a. SoHo Historic District
A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report
390 West Broadway (unknown architect, 1895) lies outside of the ostensible subject of this post, the SoHo Historic District. Instead, it looks forlornly at the other side of the street, where other buildings sit snugly-wugly under the protection of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America has been agitating to get district expanded; while 390 is within one of the areas under consideration, its 72-page submission to the NYC LPC has almost nothing about it. And why should it? Architecturally, it is nothing special; historically, it was the site of an unusually large police raid ("...they included some of the worst pickpockets and second-story men who ever were in Sing Sing.") and that appears to be about it.
I start my blog's investigation of SoHo with this middling exception because this is where I began with SoHo, close to a quarter-century ago. 390 used to house a store called Think Big!--yes, the exclamation point was part of the name. Its great gimmick was that it sold comically oversized replicas of the quotidian. Pencils, crayons, toothbrushes, postage stamps--stuff you'd learn to manipulate through years of delicate negotiation with your fingers, now scaled to barely fit the hand. This was stuff with the immediacy of pop art--the store seems to have been called "Pop/Eye-Think Big" at first--but with none of that nasty distance even Warhol could give off.
I first heard about the store from a Games Magazine article the year before. It had a picture of a woman carrying a giant yellow crayon and a quizzical expression; it was love. After a year of fascination, Dad took drove me there one humid morning near my twelfth birthday. (That was June 20th, 1983.) North Bellmore, Queens, Brooklyn, a special trip over Brooklyn Bridge, because it had just turned 100, then down to SoHo. I remember faint surprise that dad would take me someplace so desolate; mind you, I'm almost twelve at the time and have little experience with true urban desolation, so the discomforting SoHo of 1983 might be nothing to me now, or it might be the scary human-free void of pre-gentrification lore. Can't remember. There's too space between the then and now. In fact, in my memory of the place as it was, most of the buildings are lopped off to one story, and dad parks the car on cobblestone. I don't know how I could've imagined that. After about forty-five minutes agonizing, I selected a $60 yellow crayon and we went home. It stayed a few years in my room, complementing the navy blue laminate furniture I'd get a year or two later to replace. Then it was no longer fun--but could a giant non-functioning plastic crayon ever be FUN fun?--and I gave it away.
Think Big! disappeared sometime in the 90s but its idea strikes me as archetypally SoHo, lending me another good reason to start with 390. It sold items that both were amusing Pop-Art comments on the everyday, and quite excellent corporate gifts appropriate for clients during holidays. Arty commerce and commercial art, ironized consumerism and unironized consumerism: it fits in well with SoHo's own overall historical trajectory from artist lofts to retail chains. I'll talk more about that in future posts, presumably.
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report
390 West Broadway (unknown architect, 1895) lies outside of the ostensible subject of this post, the SoHo Historic District. Instead, it looks forlornly at the other side of the street, where other buildings sit snugly-wugly under the protection of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America has been agitating to get district expanded; while 390 is within one of the areas under consideration, its 72-page submission to the NYC LPC has almost nothing about it. And why should it? Architecturally, it is nothing special; historically, it was the site of an unusually large police raid ("...they included some of the worst pickpockets and second-story men who ever were in Sing Sing.") and that appears to be about it.
I start my blog's investigation of SoHo with this middling exception because this is where I began with SoHo, close to a quarter-century ago. 390 used to house a store called Think Big!--yes, the exclamation point was part of the name. Its great gimmick was that it sold comically oversized replicas of the quotidian. Pencils, crayons, toothbrushes, postage stamps--stuff you'd learn to manipulate through years of delicate negotiation with your fingers, now scaled to barely fit the hand. This was stuff with the immediacy of pop art--the store seems to have been called "Pop/Eye-Think Big" at first--but with none of that nasty distance even Warhol could give off.
I first heard about the store from a Games Magazine article the year before. It had a picture of a woman carrying a giant yellow crayon and a quizzical expression; it was love. After a year of fascination, Dad took drove me there one humid morning near my twelfth birthday. (That was June 20th, 1983.) North Bellmore, Queens, Brooklyn, a special trip over Brooklyn Bridge, because it had just turned 100, then down to SoHo. I remember faint surprise that dad would take me someplace so desolate; mind you, I'm almost twelve at the time and have little experience with true urban desolation, so the discomforting SoHo of 1983 might be nothing to me now, or it might be the scary human-free void of pre-gentrification lore. Can't remember. There's too space between the then and now. In fact, in my memory of the place as it was, most of the buildings are lopped off to one story, and dad parks the car on cobblestone. I don't know how I could've imagined that. After about forty-five minutes agonizing, I selected a $60 yellow crayon and we went home. It stayed a few years in my room, complementing the navy blue laminate furniture I'd get a year or two later to replace. Then it was no longer fun--but could a giant non-functioning plastic crayon ever be FUN fun?--and I gave it away.
Think Big! disappeared sometime in the 90s but its idea strikes me as archetypally SoHo, lending me another good reason to start with 390. It sold items that both were amusing Pop-Art comments on the everyday, and quite excellent corporate gifts appropriate for clients during holidays. Arty commerce and commercial art, ironized consumerism and unironized consumerism: it fits in well with SoHo's own overall historical trajectory from artist lofts to retail chains. I'll talk more about that in future posts, presumably.
Labels: SoHo
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