80h. 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

Haphazardly tallying up all the surviving buildings within the SoHo historic district by year, a narrative presents itself to the intrepid landmark blogger. There's a small construction peak in the early 1820s, followed by little in the 1830s, then nothing whatsoever in the 1840s. Things pick up in the 1850s, then, from about 1860 to the turn of the century, a boom: anywhere from 5 to 15 or more new buildings a year, this in a district of only 26 city blocks covering 70 acres. Things permanently trail off in the first years of the 1900s, and from an Indian Summer echo in 1907 to the time the LPC report was written, there are only blips. During the boomtime, there are revealing dips in activity, roughly corresponding to the Civil War--this is when the neighborhood took a decisive turn from residences to whorehouses and warehouses--a circa 1870 depression and the Panic of 1873. So, as we proceed in rough chronological order, we leap from buildings dating back to 1860 and 1861 to one built in 1868.



When I think of American tobacco, I think of withered leaves within North Carolina and Virginia in the older kid-specific maps of all the 50 states. I think of it as very specific to the South, and assume there must be climatological and geological excellences that make tobacco farming such an irresistible proposition there. Perhaps. But the Dutch grew tobacco in Manhattan, and before them, the Lenape; New York State once farmed non-trivial amounts of the demon weed, and Connecticut and Massachusetts still do. And Lorillard, the oldest Tobacco company in America, was New York born and bred, begun as a snuff-grinding mill and shop in 1760 on what later became Park Row. In 1868, after 108 years of catering to the American nic fit, William Leete Stone describes the company as "the largest Tobacco House in America, if not in the world" as if there could be no doubt, no need to compare figures to make sure.

383-385 West Broadway is built for Lorillard the same year, one of four buildings on the block J.B. Snook designed between 1867 and 1890. The LPC report describes its original function as a "Factory for drying and moistening tobacco." How tobacco was dried in a warehouse (as well as where the tobacco came from, why it was moistened, etc. etc.) is unknown to me. High ceilings (on the first and second floors) and numerous windows seem like requirements for air-drying the tobacco, if that's how it was done; on the other hand, these features are identical to a number of warehouses in the district, especially those on Crosby Street, so...I dunno.



In any case, what made for a good industrial building is often awesome for other uses, as we will no doubt explore further. 383-385 is now a gallery, a designer's studio, lofts, and in nice bit of full-circle, a cigar store. A much later (1890) Lorillard building next door, 391-393 West Broadway, features a contemporary artwork that might only have been possible within in the spacious confines of a former warehouse: Walter De Maria's Broken Kilometer, 500 brass rods laid down on a floor oh so so so precisely. (Fuck you, don't laugh, I think it's beautiful even though I have not actually seen it or anything; plus the guy's responsible for The Lightning Field and you cannot front on directed lightning.) Question: did De Maria think up Kilometer before he had a space for it, or did develop the work with the space in mind?

Incidentally, Lorillard got gobbled up by a tobacco trust in the 1890s, then was spat back out in 1911. Philip Morris and fellow trust constituent R. J. Reynolds would later far outpace the company in sales, though they are responsible for Newport, the country's biggest cigarettes after the almighty Marlboro. And after all that time here, they consolidated executive and manufacturing by moving their headquarters from New York City to Greensboro, North Carolina in 1997.

Mon semblable! Mon frère!

Recovering from Friday's Gawker party, I've been more interested in sleep than research, so no blog entry for Saturday. (I've been trying for at least two a week.) Until I get my ass in gear, why not say hello to Big Orange Landmarks? It's something of a Los Angeles version of The Masterpiece Next Door, though Mr. Bariscale (nb: probably not his real name) is covering landmarks declared as such by a local board, whereas I'm writing about federally-designated ones. My distinction is boring; the blog is not.

80g. 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 New York Times, 1875:

We certainly owe it to the well=known house of [D.] Appleton & Co. that it is now possible to get American books which, in respect to typography, paper, and illustrations, are in all respects equal to the best works turned out from British houses...It is the simple truth to say that no American firm could, or at any rate did, attempt to rival the best works of both London and Edinburgh till within the past ten years. In that period there has been an immense advance in American printing, and no house has done more in this forward movement than that of [D.] Appleton & Co."

(An aside: when did it become redundant to assert American quality in this fashion? When--if ever--will we stop affecting surprise when China or India equals or excels in something we Americans assume America is the best at?)

So, D. Appleton & Co. Along with limitless vistas of the forgotten, they were responsible for the memoirs of Matthew C. Perry, William Tecumseh Sherman, and William H. Seward; and, heading the charge for native intellectual respectability, served as the American publishers of such eminent Victorians as Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Charles Lyell, and--most monumentally--Charles Darwin. The evidence allows for no easy conclusion, but their neo-Renaissance office at 443-445 Broadway (Griffith Thomas, 1860) may be where On the Origin of Species was first published in the United States. It is a handsome focal point for in an intellectual revolution.



I might as well explain why I haven't talked about SoHo's cast-irons yet. I'm covering structures in rough chronological order, from the surviving Greek Revivals to the 21st century invading species; we're at about the early 1860s and the most interesting cast-irons come a touch later. (The exception is what's maybe the most famous thing in all of SoHo, E.V.Haughwout Building of 1857, but as it was landmarked separately, it'll be covered separately.) 18 Mercer (John Kellum, 1861) is an interesting cast-iron from this time, perhaps only for accidental reasons: a mossy green in contrast to the white and ivories throughout SoHo, and stripped of nearly all its ornament (no column bases, and only two capitals left), it is an unwitting precursor to Ian Schrager's 40 Bond Street. A shame about the hideous tacked-on sixth floor, though.

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.

80e. 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



Like Lord & Taylor and Bloomingdale's, Arnold, Constable & Company was one of those humble New York purveyors of "dry goods" of Old New York that eventually built full-fldged department stores; unlike its aforementioned competitors, it didn't make into the 21st Century. It started in 1825, giving it a 150-year run of serving American royalty:

Along with many another notable, President Hoover last week sent a congratulatory letter to William C. Creamer, octogenarian silk salesman of Manhattan's Arnold, Constable & Co. Salesman Creamer remembers selling silk by the yard to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. Ulysses Simpson Grant, recalls seeing Theodore Roosevelt brought to the store by his mother.

307-311 Canal Street may not look like much now (though a sympathetic renovation is underway), but this 1856 building was the company's attempt at a jawdropper showcase, a "Marble House" built in obvious reaction to A.T. Stewart's much larger "Marble Palace" half a mile down Broadway, built a decade before. (Though Tom Fletcher says the Arnold, Constable building as faced with limestone, though, and the LPC report noncommittally says it's "stone.") As luck would have it, when Arnold, Constable finished an expansion to this store in 1862, A.T. Stewart would leapfrog up to Broadway and Ninth Street in deference to New York's overall northward vibe migration.



After several more moves of its own, Arnold Constable eventually wound up at Fifth Avenue at 40th Street before it passed away in 1975. How something can accrue 150 years of experience and then just expire feels like a mystery to me. Well, not really: a few years of bad decisions can wipe out any business no matter how old, and what worked in 1856 won't necessarily work in 1929 or 1947 or 1975, obviously. Even so, the sense that institutions, no matter how old, are actually vulnerable offends an intuitive sense that they can and will just...well...remain once an undefined threshold is reached, as if age is a sufficient bulwark against changing markets and competition.

80d. 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 headline for Christopher Gray's NYT article on 139 Greene Street called it "The Longest-Running Restoration in New York City."

The article was written in 1989.

And the restoration started in 1974, making it...what? A journey of thirty-four years? YEAH, THIRTY-FOUR YEARS.

Except possibly not really. Another 1997 NYT article referred to it as a site of a 1997 fund-raising auction, which suggests 139 was at least restored enough to hold a public gathering. If so, it went back under construction soon after, as an anonymous tipster to Curbed who wrote that by 2007, it had been boarded up for "10 years at LEAST." There has been progress, though. Compare my photocomposite above with another one from 2006: the dormer windows have been fixed up quite well.

Why is this taking so long? It's a Federal townhouse, not Pompeii! Well, a commenter on the Curbed thread posted above mentioned it was owned by Peter Ballantine--someone connected to the Judd Foundation--and his wife, adding "You just try maintaining a building in SoHo on an art supervisor's wages!" Reason enough, I think!

Still must be maddening to have that building in your everyday life, even if you just walk down its street from time to time. It always troubles the consciousness as a mystery, an occasion to ask oneself "why the fuck is this thing not done yet?" (Must be even more maddening to OWN it, obviously--you have to feel for the Ballantines--but bear with me here.) I say this from my personal experiences living in the city, and living with construction: nothing ever seems to happen as fast as you think it should. There's a townhouse near where I live that's been going through a protracted restoration process since I've moved to New York in 2001. Months, perhaps years go by where nothing seems to happen, then we spectators get a couple days of guys carrying out trash in big bins, then more silence and waiting. It doesn't seem as if there's much left to do. You know, just give the walls a good paint job and install some carpeting, and it's good to go. Like a variation on one of Zeno's paradoxes, we never arrive at the project's completion, slowing ourselves down as we have to finish each task as they become simultaneously become more trivial but more numerous.



Did I say 105 Mercer Street was the second-oldest building in the district? I did. But 143 Spring Street pre-dates it by a year or two, according to the NYC LPC report. Back when the world was young and I just started working in the city, I was oft tempted to dine here, as it was home to a tempting BBQ restaurant; now the horrible horrible shoe-slinger Crocs is scheduled to move in. Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you and your goddamn already-over shoe, Crocs! Stay away from my historic district! Not that I actually live or work in SoHo, but SoHo is still mine because I am a New Yorker and nothing New York is foreign to me and everything New York is a part of me! At least in a certain sense! Or whatever, just piss off!

80c. 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 Collect Pond was 48 acres of fresh water, west of where Chinatown is today. Shitting where they ate, New Yorkers and their tanneries, their slaughterhouses, their breweries turned it into a sewer. With a city growing ever-northward, this pollution could not stand, so authorities in the early 19C filled it with the remains of a nearby hill, and drained it into a ditch in the center of a new road. This became Canal Street. In 1819, the stinking trench was covered over; it seems like these four slightly dilapidated Canal Street Federals, all dating with 1821 or before, were built in a fit of unwarranted optimism--unwarranted because the damn stink didn't go away.

The stink's gone but 327, 325, 323, and 321 Canal Street will likely never be made respectable, even with their ole-time authenticity and cute pitched roofs. There's too much traffic in front of them, with all the cars and trucks going to and from Manhattan Bridge and the Holland Tunnel, and thus there's no incentive to make remake them into ritzy homes again. Canal Street's larded with foot traffic, too, as it hosts honky-tonk electronics stores, food vendors, foldaway tables with bootleg goods. Everybody is slow, distracted by all the goods dancing at the periphery of their vision; with my impatient temperament, this means I don't linger, regardless of the mystery that exists past the storefronts.

By the way, Samuel Morse--yes, the telegraph guy--lived in 321, the one with all the hubcaps in the window.

80b. 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



Before the chains, before the artists, before the textile concerns and the cast-irons, SoHo was filled little Federal Style buildings like 107 Spring Street. It's the oldest building in the district, at least two hundred years exactly. Apart from its survivor status, its relative integrity as a building after all this time, there appears to be nothing special about it. Why it lives when grander buildings got are just landfill is a mystery; perhaps it survived through stealth, its blandness serving as camouflage.

Those shoes. Hmm. I have never understood why people throw shoes up on telephone wires--but since this is SoHo, I have to assume it's part of some incomprehensible viral ad for Nike.



The second-oldest building? Right around the corner. The LPC Report says "No. 105 [Mercer Street] was built in 1819-20 as a residence for Mary Boddy, a seamstress" and follows it with some architectural bloviation and that's it. A mysterious PDF file on a real estate website adds sexy sexual SEX to its history: the building was for a time a brothel run by a Cinderella Marshall. (What a perfect first name.) It tuns out that after the Federal style houses and before (and during) the cast-irons, the area west of Broadway became notorious as a market for love for sale. Author Marilynn Wood Hill notes wryly:

"No part of New York better exemplified mixed land use. Churches were across the street from brothels, police stations were next door, and, when the National Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1841, it toppled onto the brothel of Julia Brown, partially destroying that establishment and killing one resident prostitute."

105 may not have served as a brothel for long. Hill argues that prostitution in New York City was unconstrained by any geographic location, and was often on the move, following clientèle, fleeing the law, and just relocating almost for the sake of relocating as was common in New York City in those days. (The first of May functioned as something of an unofficial moving holiday.) Everything was moving further and further uptown, all manner of commerce included; by the 1870s, the streets that once boasted some of the city's toniest brothels had sunk to levels of depravity almost as bad as Five Points.

Today, the red lights seem to have settled around Midtown. According to Gridskipper, most of them are between 40th and 59th Streets.

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.