80z. 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; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



In 1800, the area in Manhattan later known as SoHo was largely farmland, with some development around Canal and Broadway. In 1850, it was largely middle-class residential. In 1900--by my untrustworthy estimate--85-90% of SoHo's buildings that survive today were standing. Nearly every trace of its residential life had been replaced with ornate buildings dedicated to industry and retail.

By 1950, the prime retail was long gone, having moved, like just about everything else in New York City, further and further uptown, to bigger and bigger spaces: up Broadway to 14th Street, then Ladies' Mile, then the mammoth emporiums of Macy's and Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor. Industry was still there but making a long, slow fade, away from the obsolete buildings of SoHo. Upscale women's apparel, once its bedrock, was being made in the Garment District, leaving the neighborhood for the less respectable kinds, like underwear. Industry in general was moving away from the city, with the highways and airports built after the war making it economically practical to place factories outside the heart of the city, to the suburbs and beyond. Outside the city you could build big to produce big; as Charles R. Simpson put it in his book SoHo: The Artist in the City:

"The most competitive plants were very large, one-story buildings which could incorporate the new continuous material flow-systems. Mechanization, the key to the competitive advantage, had raised the average floor area per employee from 1,140 square feet in 1922 to 4,550 square feet in 1945."

A quick skim through the city government's map portal shows just how inadequate SoHo was to contemporary industry: the lot size of its buildings range from 502-504 Broadway's 16,670 square feet to 112-114 Prince Street's paltry 3,000; the old rowhouses from the early 19th century run even smaller. Simpson again:

"While suburban plants were accommodating block-long, continuous-bake ovens and huge rotary presses, firms in the South Houston District were finding that even forklift trucks were too large for use in thirty-foot wide structures and eight-by-eight foot elevators."

Artists took them over these old buildings, starting around the late 50s. And from then on ours is a familiar story of official arrogance and civic revolt, invisibility and edginess and unhipness. There are times when it seems like every person on every blog with a tenuous connection to New York knows about how Quango Moloch Robert Moses wished to piledrive an expressway thru Broome Street, destroying this and this and this and this and OMG this. And how Jane Jacobs helped bring the man down, fucking up one public hearing on the plan by destroying the stenotype machine recording the event, saying "There's no tape, so there's been no meeting." Or how all those artists sought changes in the zoning laws to make their illegal residences legit in the eyes of the law. And how the galleries and the restaurants and the museums and the luxury shops and the developers and the chains and the cupcake stores all followed. The script is so central to mythology of New York City urbanism that I feel no great urge to explain in any great detail how we got from this point to now; instead, I want to wave off versions of it as cliché. There are those who look at something like Jean Nouvel's blue-baby 40 Mercer Street building (pictured above), with its units priced at $6.9 and $8.2 million, as a sign that SoHo's lost its "edge" (which seems to have something to do with picturesque squalor, or the poor regarded as mere objects of aesthetic contemplation). Instead, I'd point out that the neighborhood has come full-circle of a sort: once residential, now residential again; once retail mecca, now retail mecca again. Not that this is an entirely satisfying run of events--no room for the middle class, the poor, art--but if anything's being betrayed, it's not the neighborhood's essence, if there ever was such a thing.