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.)

65. No. 8 Thomas Street Building

A.K.A.: David S. Brown Store
Location: 8 Thomas Street
Built: 1875-6
Architect: Jarvis Morgan Slade
National Register Number: 80002705
Listed: April 30, 1980
Visited: May 8, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYC PLC report



My references describe it as Gothic Revival, Venetian division. Now I went to Venice as a teen but remember little of it save for crummy personal shit. Never read Ruskin, either. (I should though, right?) And apparently No. 8 is a relic of a style with few surviving examples in the city. So how am I going to contextualize this building? Well, it sometimes uses bold shapes and colors and quotes older styles...well, sounds kinda postmodern to me! Yes, obviously wrong--modernism arguably hadn't even started yet when this building was built, forget about its putative successor--and yet it's my understanding of postmodern architecture that comes rushing in to fill the vacuum of my knowledge.



I don't mean New York postmodern, though. Our examples of the style such the Sony Building, Worldwide Plaza, and 60 Wall Street are a turn-off; the details meant to distinguish them from the soulless glass boxes of the modernists are so blunt, so elephantine they end up making not much of a difference at all. No. 8 is so modest in size there's no room for elephants, just a rather fanciful composition of colonnettes, arches, mansard roof, and punctuating oculus, all scaled just right for the man in the street below to apprehend and enjoy.