80x. 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



Once a neoclassical post office of no geat shakes in a city (in a country) choked with them, 103-107 Prince Street (Thomas W. Lamb, 1910) was made respectable for the New Glitzy SoHo via a 2002 transformation into New York City's first Apple Store. Respectable, and sort of annoying. With five million customers in a little less than four years, and presumably even greater numbers of people there just to look and see and scream at the Jonas Brothers, it's come to be regarded as a menance to local residents on a scale that no bar or restaurant has ever been, or ever could be.

It's won awards and high hosannas--even appearing on the lower rungs of the AIA 150, but I can't get too excited about it. While the exterior retains a memory of its former life, as far as I can remember, its interior is so Apple-tasteful it betrays not a single clue that it was ever anything other than an Apple store: I've seen the future, and it's oppressively neutral. Me, I much prefer the razzle-dazzle of its younger brother on 59th Street, a glassy gift box endlessly reflecting back upon itself. Plus it's open 24/7/365 like a real fucking New York flagship store should.

I make a point of not taking pictures where they're not allowed, not even surreptitiously, not even if I can get away with it, and I tend to assume any the security guards at any retail store won't be happy if I start using my camera, no matter well-populated it is. Thing is, I think just about every computer in the store is equipped with a webcam and online access, so...

80w. 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



Balconies encourage contemplation, not industriousness. The Little Singer Building (Ernest Flagg, 1904), then, is the damnedest thing: a commercial building with balconies for nearly every floor. And each is framed by the Christmas colors of green wrought-iron railings and red terra-cotta. Who could've frequented these balconies but the Sad Gatsbys of the sewing machine world, musing upon the Broadway homunculi below or flicking ash into the air during a midday smoking break? Except no. Christopher Gray says it was used as a "product showroom" for Singer(perhaps looking something like this showroom in Bangalore, right down to the machines themselves) and was otherwise "...fully occupied by underwear, infant clothing and related industries" when it opened in 1904. So homely. Yet even in a neighborhood of extraordinary fancifulness, remarkably fanciful.

80v. 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



Designed by John T. Williams, finished in 1896--over a hundred years old and 443-449 Broome Street is still a beacon in SoHo, tall and thin and broad. And as if to deny its boxy silhouette, the top three stories are given a full-on ornamental treatment of leaves and scrolls and shells and things in between. And as if to deny the modernity of its steel-frame construction, it analogizes to a Corinthian column: frilly top, the middle marked by tall and unornamented pilasters, the bottom a thick base.



The end result is beautiful, but all this historical and natural reference is perhaps overkill, too. Was it done out of some barely-acknowledged guilt over the imposition the building made on its neighborhood? Or was it a way to forestall the inevitable: the plunge towards height--the Park Row Building was only three years ago--that would end up annihilating so much of what 19th-century man knew about architecture and nature?

80u. 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



The high and broad arches and rusticated stone of 484-490 Broome Street (Alfred Zucker, 1891) emphasize bluntness and bulk, but the façade is also dotted with all these fine and little details. Supporting the arches are examples of the Ouroboros: a dragon that devours its tail, a symbol of infinity, self-generation, renewal. Rather cosmic for a warehouse. But not too cosmic for an arts space.

The Kitchen moved here after its original hone, the Mercer Arts Center, collapsed rather dramatically in 1973. The Kitchen made its mark in the world of culture as a place for video art, but I'm an occasional rock critic and am more blown away by its rep for hosting some of the awesomest players of the downtown New York music scene, from unholy minimalists to noise jerks. Plus things like Ralph Ellison and Julius Hemphill...together, on stage. UNGH NOSTALGIA ATTACK. Excuse me, how can I take the number 6 train to 1981?

80t. 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



Built in 1890 and designed by Richard Berger, 112-114 Prince Street is one of the last buildings in SoHo constructed with a complete cast-iron façade. (According to Margot Gayle, 550 Broadway, completed in 1895, is the city's last. No picture, sorry.) Christopher Gray called it "...nothing special, just a typically ornate SoHo cast-iron facade..." which sounds damning only if you discount the amazingly high quality of SoHo cast-irons--are there any boring or bad ones in the neighborhood? Does it even make sense to say there are, given how cumulative their effect is?



What makes the building stand out from the others, though, isn't its façade but its simulated continuation on a formerly blank wall by the artist Richard Haas. The 1975 mural has some rep as a local landmark, and when it was in better shape (something like this), I'm pretty sure it fooled me at least once. But I think it's too gimmicky a gesture, and it loses its charm once the initial shock is lost. Its historical grasp is a little tenuous as well. To incorporate two existing windows into the mural, Haas painted several bays narrower than the others, creating a vertical asymmetry I don't think any 19th century architect would allow in a ground-up design. And I can't think of any non-street, non-entrance building side in SoHo that receives the level of architectural treatment the mural depicts. There were practical reasons architects left them blank back in the day. After all, why add a lot of decorative doo-dads when they might get compromised or destroyed by a new neighboring building? Cast-iron façades also gained value from their relationships to sidewalk filled with consumers peering into wide store windows, or walking in and out of dramatic, kingly entrances. Cast-irons are grand because they had beauty and utility; in contrast, this mural is corny.

My secret rock critic shame.

This Sunday at 9PM EST, I'll be liveblogging the 2008 Video Music Awards for Idolator.com. While I spend most my blogtime writing about buildings--surprise!--I also write about music, as my way-not-updated archives will show. And I've tackled MTV before, blogging 24 hours' worth of the channel in real time back in 2001. (As you'll see, you'll have to read the posts in backwards order.) I may have invented liveblogging in the process--a fact I never tire of boring people with.

Blog Appetit!

80s. 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 1892 Moses King called 549-555 Broadway (Alfred Zucker, 1890) "...the tallest mercantile building of the longest, most varied and most interesting avenues in the world." "This store of stores is 75 by 200 feet in area, and has twelve floors, each floor being equal to six city stores of 25 by 100 feet, making 72 stores of large size in one building." Contemporary department stores are bigger than 180K square feet as a matter of course, but in its day it was described as "...the great curiosity shop of America," filled with "...almost everything that could be though of for the ornamentation of a mansion or the recreation or amusement of its occupants..."



The man behind the store, Charles Broadway Rouss, was as outsized as his creation. He made some money in retail back in Virginia, fought in the Civil War, lost the money, moved to New York, made some money, lost it all again, spent time in debtor's prison, then made some real fucking money. During the store's construction in 1889, a sign was placed on the site that celebrated Rouss' triumph at reaching a third act in life:

"He who builds, owns and will occupy this marvel of brick, iron and granite, thirteen years ago walked these streets penniless and $50,000 in debt. Only to prove that the capitalists of to-day were poor men twenty years ago, and that many a fellow facing poverty to-day may be a capitalist a quarter of a century hence, if he will. Pluck, adorned with ambition, backed by honor bright, will always command success, even without the almighty dollar."

Some of the architecture guides that quote it--and how could one resist from quoting it?--neglect to mention that it was written in an aggressively non-standard English, as Rouss was a partisan for phonetic spelling, even going so far as to publish a monthly industry journal with it. Then he went blind. In an unsettling detail, Rouss paid another blind man a dollar a day to undergo treatments (one account says it was from at least 180 doctors) to see what, if anything, worked. Nothing did.



A few years before he died in 1902, he expanded the building by about 25 feet to the north. Christopher Gray says the two triangular dormers were added perhaps because Rouss could feel them easily on an architectural model, an observation which makes a lot of intuitive sense; he also adds that the "...meeting point between the original building and the addition is evident to the careful observer..." which I admit I don't see, possibly thanks to a careful restoration a few years ago that also simplified its color scheme from one with all manner of pinks and buffs to a glistening beige. Floodlights were also added to the façade, giving it some show-stopping, attention-grabbing drama; even if Rouss couldn't see them, he'd understand them.

80r. 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



Apart from its long stretch of ten whole bays stretching down Greene Street, 109-111 Prince Street's most striking feature is its chamfered corner. A little bit of real estate surrendered to the sidewalk pays back dividends in drama: an entire side of a building dedicated to your grand entrance.

Jarvis Morgan Slade designed it. He died at 30, only two months after construction began in 1883. A fucking bummer to think about, for two rather different reasons: he was robbed of the chance of producing more and doing better than he did--and yet even with seven years fewer years than my own time on earth, Slade still managed to made his mark on the Manhattan so much more permanently and effectively. (Are there 30-year-old architects in the city building big today?)



I feel guilty that I keep going back to initial circa '93-'94 memories of SoHo, but when the Replay here was the Replay Country Store it was an alluringly shopgasmic experience. As its name suggests, its organizing theme was "the West", an already a series of clichés without connection to the lived experience to most Americans but oversimplified yet again by European sensibility. In other words, it was false and silly and yet...and it was perhaps the closest thing I know to what all the old retail emporiums of 19th century must've been like, a valiant attempt at getting everything under one roof. There were stacks of wearables everywhere; the walls were as bric-a-bracked-out with old kitsch as a T.G.I. Friday's. When you were finished exploring one floor, there was another. It seemed endless. It seemed like everything was on sale. There was no way to handle it. I could never concentrate enough to even begin to decide what to buy. Yeah, it didn't last. I went again last year. They cleared everything out, surely years ago; got rid of all the complexity, surface overwhelming purchasable items. It seemed creepy and sterile, smaller.



(Conflict of interest alert: I've worked with the principals of the firm behind 109's 1993 renovation when my firm teamed up for a few project proposals we didn't win, IIRC.)