80m. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



The King of Greene Street. At five stories high and ten bays wide, it's an imposition: only a few buildings on the street take up so much room. But as with The Queen of Greene Street, its two middle bays project onto the sidewalk just a little bit, making it look somewhat "evolved" next to the buildings on the street that keep their façades flush with each other, like the three-dimensional sphere compared to the Flatlander square.

Unlike most of the landmarks we've visited so far, I can actually show what the building looks like on the inside thanks to racked.com's pictures of 72's interior. They show quite a lot of empty space barely interrupted by a line of spindly things in the middle, probably made of cast iron like the façade. Iron wasn't merely good for pretty Grecian and Italianate exterior effects but got some use as a structural material as well, at least until the far stronger cast steel became a mass-produceable commodity. As The New York Times noted:

"More than this, cast-iron was strong: its tall, thin columns could support large, open interior spaces with high ceilings and big windows--just what department-store owners wanted for their showrooms during the age of the gas light."

As racked.com's photos show, it's still good for showrooms, even in the age of electric light. (Parties, too.)



In spite of 72-76's grandeur, I can't tell if the stores of its early years were especially ritzy. I've found a furrier and a wholesale silks outfit. The upper floors appear to have been devoted to the storage and/or manufacture of things like caps and wigs. Which is numbingly predictable, actually. During our little SoHo jaunt, I've been laboriously going through mentions of each address in Google Books and The New York Times archives, seeing if there is some fresh insight, some hidden irony about these buildings that I can share with you, gentle reader. Mostly what I've discovered are names after names of apparel companies that bequeathed no obvious progeny to history: they started up, labored on for a while, then went out of business, often when the owner died or faced bankruptcy during one of the 19th century's many economic busts. SoHo is so dense with these little businesses sometimes seems as if the linchpin to New York's Gilded-Age economy was women's apparel.

Also utterly forgotten: Isaac F. Duckworth, the architect of both the King and Queen. The 1973 LPC Landmark Designation Report for SoHo flat-out says he "was a New York City architect about whom little is known"; there are only two contemporary mentions in The New York Times, and both involve legal action between he and a John Roach. The nature of these suits are not detailed, but if this is the same John Roach as the New York shipbuilder, it might've been about both men's construction material of choice: iron.