80f. 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
The first thing that really made me conquer my fear of the city and visit the place on my lonesome was clothes. Music...well, Record World, when supplemented by the some of the used record joints on Long Island, covered most of the music I wanted to know about. Clothes, though, were a weirder proposition. When I started yearning for obsolete styles of suited slick, suburban casual, subcultural hip, there was just no place round my parts that could touch that satorial g-spot. My mom and I spent my nineteenth birthday driving around Long Island trying to find a decent a vintage clothing on Long Island, we said fuck it and spent the next day in scary New York City, buying stuff at Star Struck, Cheap Jacks, Unique Boutique, Antique Boutique, some of which I still have, some of which I still wear. This experience was so satisfying I stopped using my ma as the city-chauffeur and started going alone--sometimes to See/Hear for fanzines, or The Strand for books, or museums for kicks, but more usually the aforementioned vintage shops to capture a look I maybe saw in a magazine somewhere.
502-504 Broadway (John Kellum, 1960) used to house Canal Jeans. I went there a couple of times after I got a job in New York City in 1993, at which time vintage shops were starting ever-so-slowly to suck from growing prices and shrinking selection, then disappear POOF! in a cloud of musty gabardine. Still, the place was impressive: just when you thought you'd seen everything it had to offer, there'd be a new door or walkway with a more jeans, more shirts, more stuff. Naturally I never bought anything. Once they sold new jeans for $20! My God, I was so disbelieving I didn't even try them on. I figured there had to be something unseemly about them.
Some years later, touring SoHo with a copy of the AIA Guide to New York City in hand, I finally got a good look at the building. So grand it was. Like 85 Leonard, an almost exact contemporary, it was built in the "sperm-candle" style, though in marble rather than cast-iron (except for the ground floor), its columns soaring upwards into supple arches. It was late spring but the building felt like...it felt like Christmas. I don't know how else to put it. It was oddly festive, special. I don't even know why the association came about--Was it the façade's snowy whiteness? The Victorian-era architecture? The lure of shopping?--but it did, and it came strong.
It's now a Bloomingdale's. (Canal Jeans shuffled off to Brooklyn.) Here's a rare moment on the blog where I have to mention a potential conflict of interest: the place where I work for employs a number of the people behind the renovation while at a now-defunct design firm. They're good folks, some of the nicest people you'd ever meet, so I may be biased when I say I'm rather fond of the place. The department stores I knew from my Long Island mall days were near-windowless boxes so wide you could practically see the curvature of the earth; this location is half the size of the company's next-smallest stores, and filled with natural light coming through the windows on Broadway and Crosby Street, as well as two sets of roof windows--restoring it, perhaps unwittingly, to something like the fabulous retail showplace it must've been in the 1860s.
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
The first thing that really made me conquer my fear of the city and visit the place on my lonesome was clothes. Music...well, Record World, when supplemented by the some of the used record joints on Long Island, covered most of the music I wanted to know about. Clothes, though, were a weirder proposition. When I started yearning for obsolete styles of suited slick, suburban casual, subcultural hip, there was just no place round my parts that could touch that satorial g-spot. My mom and I spent my nineteenth birthday driving around Long Island trying to find a decent a vintage clothing on Long Island, we said fuck it and spent the next day in scary New York City, buying stuff at Star Struck, Cheap Jacks, Unique Boutique, Antique Boutique, some of which I still have, some of which I still wear. This experience was so satisfying I stopped using my ma as the city-chauffeur and started going alone--sometimes to See/Hear for fanzines, or The Strand for books, or museums for kicks, but more usually the aforementioned vintage shops to capture a look I maybe saw in a magazine somewhere.
502-504 Broadway (John Kellum, 1960) used to house Canal Jeans. I went there a couple of times after I got a job in New York City in 1993, at which time vintage shops were starting ever-so-slowly to suck from growing prices and shrinking selection, then disappear POOF! in a cloud of musty gabardine. Still, the place was impressive: just when you thought you'd seen everything it had to offer, there'd be a new door or walkway with a more jeans, more shirts, more stuff. Naturally I never bought anything. Once they sold new jeans for $20! My God, I was so disbelieving I didn't even try them on. I figured there had to be something unseemly about them.
Some years later, touring SoHo with a copy of the AIA Guide to New York City in hand, I finally got a good look at the building. So grand it was. Like 85 Leonard, an almost exact contemporary, it was built in the "sperm-candle" style, though in marble rather than cast-iron (except for the ground floor), its columns soaring upwards into supple arches. It was late spring but the building felt like...it felt like Christmas. I don't know how else to put it. It was oddly festive, special. I don't even know why the association came about--Was it the façade's snowy whiteness? The Victorian-era architecture? The lure of shopping?--but it did, and it came strong.
It's now a Bloomingdale's. (Canal Jeans shuffled off to Brooklyn.) Here's a rare moment on the blog where I have to mention a potential conflict of interest: the place where I work for employs a number of the people behind the renovation while at a now-defunct design firm. They're good folks, some of the nicest people you'd ever meet, so I may be biased when I say I'm rather fond of the place. The department stores I knew from my Long Island mall days were near-windowless boxes so wide you could practically see the curvature of the earth; this location is half the size of the company's next-smallest stores, and filled with natural light coming through the windows on Broadway and Crosby Street, as well as two sets of roof windows--restoring it, perhaps unwittingly, to something like the fabulous retail showplace it must've been in the 1860s.
Labels: Bloomingdale's, John Kellum, retail, SoHo
posted by Michael at
11:37 PM
4 Comments:
I find it interesting that you mention clothes as a draw. I think that music (not record buying per se, but shows and nightclubs) and unique retail that led (and does not get enough credit for) leading the revitalization -- and interest in -- the city beginning in the 1980s. I know that as a suburban Chicago kid, I would go into the city to go shopping (or as it often was just trying things on) at the Alley at Clark and Belmont. And then as I came into my gay identity, came down to go to the gay youth center and try to flirt my way into clubs. All ages shows at the Metro were also a draw and the teen dance clubs.
In June, Q magazine did a feature on Manchester and the rise of the Madchester seen and raves and bands and someone at the end of the article talked about how all of that led to an interest in the city that didn't exist before that. Manchester looks like SoHo or the Meatpacking District now -- expensive stores and trendy lofts. Would anyone have found that had they not come into the city looking for an edge they didn't have in the suburbs? Maybe not. Seems likely anyway.
I'm not sure retail and music get credit for urban revitalization so much as they get some of the blame for gentrification; the idea is that they attract the bridge-and-tunnel crowds or the flyover folk who eventually remake the city according to their corrupting ideas of what they, in their infinitely dubious taste, like about the city. You can see this most nakedly with some of the rhetoric surrounding the Sex in the City backlash: the show is supposed to reflect and encourage a girly consumerist superficiality destroying the manly industrial authenticity of Old New York. I would like to think this is unfair (as the SATC example shows, its politics are utterly fucked, both gender-wise and class-wise) but honestly I have little grasp about why people come to Manhattan nowadays anyway. I always assume it's for terrible reasons. I want to assume that what people see in this place goes beyond "OMG SO CUTE" or "MONEY MONEY MONEY" or "the world is my pied-à-terre" but I can never be sure.
Anyway, for music...well, it's not the pull it once was. (I mean, to take one example, when it comes to dance music, London and Berlin have been TOTALLY PWNING Manhattan for most of the '90s and '00s. To say nothing of Brooklyn, eesh!) You can blame that in part to restrictive cabaret laws and an overall deterritorialization of music thanks to...oh God, mass media, the digital turn, so many things.
Ah, Canal Jeans. I spent many an hour and dollar there about 10 years ago. Oddly, the last few times I've been on that stretch of Broadway, I didn't even notice the Bloomie's.
Re: music & clothes getting blamed for gentrification: I got the sense that this was the thrust of criticism of a lot of gentrification in the old LES, especially around the old CBGB building. I have to go with you that "cool" retail is not the cause, but is an easy scapegoat.
@michael
I don't know about the 1990s. I spent many a good time in NY's rave and club culture in the 1990s. I think others were watching NY just as we were in DC and Chicago. Sure the RAVE Act (a Federal law) affected some of that by the end. (Although other than Berlin, London has had tough go of it by the end of the 1990s as well. And just seems to be coming back.) Most cities have strange cabaret laws. SF -- which is so famous for its dance music -- has one of the more onerous cabaret laws. And yet, there are still places to go out. (Some, admittedly, have been around for 30 years, SF zoning prefers existing uses over change in uses.)
Anyway... as for the BLAME issue. Yes. I suppose credit and blame can be spread around in equal parts. And artists and musicians have always been the first brigade in the gentrification process, since at least the 19th century and the rise of the modern era. But it terms of city leaders, who seem to want gentrification, they are quite willing to shove the artists and musicians under the rug as soon as the neighborhood begins to show life. "Thanks for showing us what a great place the city can be and how wonderful our existing building stock is... we'll take it from here. You have 30 days to vacate."
Post a Comment
<< Home