80q. 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



569-575 Broadway (Thomas Stent, 1882) is currently Prada's New York flagship. Can't say much about the interior of the store because...well, can't take any pictures of it as it's private property. OK, OK, I haven't even been inside. I'm a guy! Oops, wait, it's got menswear, too. Yeah, I've been lazy.

Prior to that, it was the Guggenheim's SoHo branch. Originally envisioned as extra offices and storage, it became a full-fledged exhibition space that both served as the anchor for a downtown "Museum Mile", and an opening volley of the feverish expansion plans the Guggenheim tried to realize throughout the nineties and early aughties. I have fond memories of the SoHo branch, particularly the John Cage Rolywholyover: A Circus show staged only two years after he died. In it, artwork by and about Cage, his compatriots, and from city museums were displayed in four rooms according to chance operations in a kind of well-curated anarchy; some of them would hung and rehung at odd places on the museum walls, leaving many a hole from the vacated nails. I thought it was so neat.



I took my friend Colin Meeder there when I wanted to show him New York City in general and SoHo in particular. (He was impressed.) I am almost embarrassed to say that now. Did I become too hip for SoHo or did SoHo become too unhip for me? I don't know. The loss of the artworld, even in the canon-ready form that the Guggenheim offered, meant the area became less fun to me--that I know. In my mind the show was the last broadcast from SoHo's artside carnivalesque (even if it was a traveling exhibition): soon after, I stopped thinking of the neighborhood as something other than a shopping epicenter. Of SoHo's museums on Broadway, the Guggenheim SoHo died in 2001, the New Museum shuffled off to the Bowery, the Museum of African Art is moving uptown, and the Alternative Museum is now online-only.



And way way way before all that, the building was one of the homes of the pioneering men's clothier Rogers, Peet & Co. 14to42.net (who I really must put on my links list) lists the company's innovation: "they attached tags to garments giving fabric composition, they marked garments with price tags (the established practice was to haggle), they offered customers their money back if not satisfied, and they used illustrations of specific merchandise in their advertising."

The building itself is charmingly brawny. Although its partly-swizzly columns on the ground floor and its cornice are iron, I think it might've been designed to stand out amongst the neighborhood's cast-irons, of which I bet fickle New York was tiring in the 1880s: ivory paint replaced by furious red brick; instead of the dazzling repetition of forms, the Broadway side gives every story gets a markedly different treatment.

80p. 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



Which twin has the Toni?

As you can see from the photo, two buildings. The one on the right, 103-105 Greene Street, was designed by our old friend, Henry Fernbach, back in 1879. It's a lived a life of silk goods and shirtwaists, then bohemian rediscovery, fabulous restaurant, expensive apartments, nice stores. The usual, thanks. Its mirror image, 101 Greene Street, was built at exactly the same time and lived an identical SoHo life.

...until it burned down in January 1957. A one-story garage took its place, or was fashioned from its remnants; the 1973 Landmarks Preservation Commission report on SoHo stated that "Although filed as an 'alteration' the changes were so extensive that they practically constitute a new building."

I know, I know. You're looking at that picture above and thinking Waaaait a minute. A garage. I should be seeing a garage here, and yet I am not seeing one--I see two buildings, conjoined twins, identical in every respect including, presumably, age. But no. Thanks to an ambitious collaboration between developer Goldman Properties, architect Joseph Pell Lombardi, and cast-metal specialists Historical Arts & Casting, Inc., the old 101 Greene Street was resurrected in its entirety, façade and all--indeed, the first new cast-iron façade built in SoHo in over a hundred years--using 103-105 as a model.

To take a building of no great reputation and bring it back to a state of wholeness it hadn't known in fifty years: what a wonderfully needless thing to do. Whether they're in a historically-sensitive building or no, people are still gonna buy the lofts, because lofts are big and spacious and sexy; save for a tiny coterie of the architecturally-aware, people'll pass 101 by and think--if they think about it all--that it was always like that. So I think 101 was done the way it was done out of a love of SoHo, corny as that sounds. From what I can tell, the whole thing was the brainchild of Goldman Properties; if you go to their website, wait about ten seconds, and turn up the volume on your computer, Tony Goldman himself will tell you how much he loves historic preservation in goofy dazzled prideful tones, sounding not unlike Jean Shepherd in A Christmas Story. Mr. Goldman, I salute you. One hates to give it up for a developer--distrust is always the safer position--but there we are.

80o. 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



A wall of cast-iron--with a curve.

Some of my guidebooks mention that the Gunther Building (Griffith Thomas, 1872) was built for William H. Gunther of C.G. Gunther's Sons, perhaps the pre-eminent furrier of New York City in the 19th century. What they don't mention is its connection to a mayor of New York City. Charles Godfrey Gunther was the oldest of C.G. Gunther's sons and part of the family business (which occupied 502-504 Broadway for a time). A Copperhead elected at the tail-end of a Civil War he opposed, he--rather ironically--foiled a Confederate plot to burn the city down, and, less than a year later, stood by as Abraham Lincoln lay in state at City Hall after his assassination. This posthumous bio says he "attended strictly to his private business" after his 1864-1865 term, which says to me it's possible he was still part of C.G. Gunther's Sons when the Broome Street location was completed in 1872.



Other than the way it dominates the streetscape, the most striking thing about the building is that one of its bays--windows included--curves to meet the corner of Broome and Greene Streets. The second-story bay is capped with a pediment telling future generations, even those with no clue to its significance, that this is the "GUNTHER BUILDING," damnit. Apparently there were once life-sized statues on the pedestals at the sides.



The Gunther Building's partner-in-crime next door, 477-479 Broome Street (Elisha Shiffen, 1873), was yet another home to SoHo silks. But at time, the Cheney Brothers were the Magilla Gorilla of all American silk operations, with The New York Times describing their Connecticut factories as the places where "American dress silks were first manufactured in any large quantity"; Moses King's 1892 Handbook describes the company as "outranking all others in America."

After the Industrial Revolution completely streamlined silk production, demand for the material sunk thanks to competition from synthetic materials like nylon. The Cheney Brothers lingered around and shriveled until they were purchased by the J.P. Stevens company in 1955--the same company behind the story of Norma Rae.

If you were wondering--and I'm sure you were--Dick Cheney is at best only distantly related to the Cheney Brothers. As far as I can tell, anyway.

80n. 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



Last entry I was mourning how the SoHo of my researches was shaping up to be a landscape of almost-nameless hat factories and silk stores, but I spoke a little too soon. 47-49 Mercer Street (Joseph M. Dunn, 1873)was owned by Alexander Roux, a cabinet-maker maybe only known to American antiquarians, but still, what a relief to encounter somebody who's left traces beyond mangled scans on Google Books.

Roux's work is at the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and on eBay for prices that are more than I make in a year. And they are rather incredible. I know nothing about antiques and have never really had much desire to reverse the situation, but...I respect these pieces. Well-trained hands and sharp tools made some pieces of wood sing with a human voice. The care could break your heart. The slopes of lines, rococo crannies. Tiny inlays. The grain of wood followed. Techniques learned in guilds and passed down from generation to generation. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Well, I'm sure somebody does, somewhere. But it's rare. No demand for it. Roux had the demand, he had the workers (120 by the 1850s) and the techniques (steam-powered saws!) to produce $250-$500K of furniture a year (about $5 to $11 million today). That's an enterprise roughly comparable to one of your 21st-century suburban kitchen cabinet barns. Today, when Americans want to buy furniture with this level of craftsmanship, they just buy antiques. And most don't. (My apartment is entirely furnished with about a thousand bucks of IKEA--they make furniture for people who don't want to care about furniture.)

This furniture made me curious why this cast-iron, as lovely as it is, wasn't built to suggest their level of detail: they could've maybe indulged in a Gothic fantasy like 448 Broome or something as obsessively ornate as the Haughwout. Costs, I guess. Fashion and fitting in are other possible reasons. Maybe Roux was already looking ahead to his next address and being mindful of resale value. (I'm sorry I keep peppering the blog with so many questions I can't answer.) The LPC report says this was a store--as was nearby 53 Mercer, also factory space--but it's not clear what kind of status it had compared to Roux's other locations. Most are gone, except for 827-829 Broadway, one of the finest cast-irons outside SoHo, smothered in butterscotch.

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.

80l. 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



It is affectionately known by those in the know as The Queen of Greene Street. Forget my photograph, capturing No. 28-30 Greene (Isaac F. Duckworth, 1873) towards the end of a well-deserved renovation. Instead, take a look at the cover of Margot Gayle's 1974 survey Cast-Iron Architecture in New York; see how its stern windows stare down the reader with royal hauteur, see how they're framed by a tiled mansard roof the way a ruff frames an Elizabethan head.

A former warehouse, but like the Fleming Smith, like 176-170 John Street, like many buildings in SoHo, a warehouse that got above its raisin', a building much too elegant to simply hold stuff. But what it held in its day, though, was possibly appropriate anyway: silks and ribbon and lace, fancy frills.

80k. 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



From left to right: 65, 67, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 79 and 81 Greene Street. Save for two, all the buildings were designed by one man, Henry Fernbach. He is the best-represented architect in the SoHo historic district, with thirty-four buildings to his name, twenty-five of them on Greene Street alone, in fact. Many are defined by rows of simple Tuscan columns, often supporting some seriously chunky arches whose name (if they even have one) escapes me.

Possessing both consistency and prodigiousness leaves an architect open to charges of hackery, and requesting a building that blends in rather than stands out leaves a client open to charges of immature taste. ("I want the same thing as that, only different. A little bit different.") On the other hand, the relative homogeneousness of Greene Street (as well as the rest of SoHo) might've been something collectively sought by architects and clients alike. How else to explain the spectacle of 65 and 67 Greene Street, the grey building on the left which is actually two separate buildings built by two separate architects (J.B. Snook and Fernbach respectively) for two separate owners, yet joined by a common façade? The result may have looked good. Even today, even after so much has come and gone in the neighborhood, even with the disfiguring fire escapes and new interlopers in former parking lots, when certain blocks are given a wide-angle view--say, looking down a street from somewhere in its middle--the brain and eye delights in blurring out all the nominal differences between buildings and connecting what they have in common until what it sees are faint and broken lines all merging towards a point on the horizon. But architectural homogeneity also had a more practical value, too, I'm guessing. It likely underscored the buildings that didn't fit in, which in the 1870s would've been the vice-breeding remnants of the neighborhood's residential and entertainment life--the very thing the industrialists and retailers moving into the area would want to isolate and destroy, physically and psychologically.



Fernbach is primarily remembered for his work on Central Synagogue, which is something else altogether from his stern neo-Grecs--it's...a polychrome celebration. He is sometimes cited as New York City's first Jewish architect of consequence, or even the first Jewish person to practice architecture in the country, though his sometime collaborator Leopold Eidlitz has been called similar. That this bellwether of cultural acceptance comes after nearly two hundred years of a Jewish presence in the city genuinely shocks me--though that's probably because I'm shamefully ignorant of Jewish history. Give me time.

80j. 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



Vaux, Withers & Co. did this one in 1872. Calvert Vaux you might already know, (if not: he was half of the team behind Central Park), Frederick Clarke Withers you probably don't. Together they were instrumental in popularizing Gothic architecture in the non-native soil of America. One of the more obscure works of the firm (perhaps the most famous is the Jefferson Market Library), 448 Broome is an attempt at adapting the churchy style to the mass-produced aesthetic of cast-iron on store...and it doesn't really click: the broad windows don't give the ornamentation enough room to breathe, I think. To be fair, it's hard to see this building for what it is, or was. Fire escapes now cover three of its four bays on four of its five floors, and even worse, its cornice--looking very much like Withers' altar and reredos for Trinity Church--was removed at some indeterminate point, possibly because it wasn't stable, possibly because it was old-fashioned. Sadly, what's left is easy to ignore. (The poor thing.) The most distinctive thing about it is the woolly vegetation growing from the fifth floor.

80i. 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



Some very brief words about cast iron. The subject is so rich I have been stupidly avoiding it for fear of getting lost in its nooks and crannies and missing self-imposed blogging deadlines. Well, enough of that.

For millennia, architecture was defined by timber, stone, and earth; today, what dominates the world's cities is glass and steel. Metal had been used for roofs, for decorative elements, for structural reinforcement since the Romans, but it is only until the Industrial Revolution that the techniques required to produce metal alloys suitable for architectural construction in large quantities are discovered. One of them is cast iron. Cast iron is a high-carbon iron alloy that, when liquified, can be...cast--that is, poured into molds. The alloy was used in bridges and domes and mills. Eventually the Americans James Bogardus (whose work we've discussed before, briefly) and Daniel Badger would develop a brilliant method of manufacturing many individual cast-iron parts (such as columns) that could be bolted together to create a building façade.



This use of cast iron was an extraordinary conceptual leap for architecture. Even though a building with an iron façade such as 427-429 Broadway (Thomas Jackson, 1871) apes styles hundreds of years old--Joseph Pell Lombardi Architects says it's "Venetian Renaissance style with French Renaissance detailing"--they are deployed in a thoroughly modern way. Much like building with Lego bricks, creating a façade from multiples of a finite number of standardized pieces encourages an economy of form in architecture, and repetition on a scale rarely seen in Renaissance architecture. As Philip Johnson, in his forward to Margot Gayle's book on Bogardus, wrote:

As an influence on my own design work Bogardus looms larger, let us say, even than Louis Sullivan. Even Richardson, a greater architect, was not such a direct ancestor of mine as James Bogardus. It is, fortunately, easy to say why. With his cast-iron facades, he acquainted Americans with modular rhythm, which is the basis of modern design. Imagine Mies without a module. Imagine Le Corbusier wihout the basic freedom of evenly spaced windows.

More about cast-irons in subsequent posts. (Phew, this one got in right under the wire.) But what of 427-429? The Joseph Pell Lombardi website calls it both "The A. J. Ditenhoffer Building" and "The A. J. Dittenhoffer Building"; the LPC designation report favors the latter spelling. And both are probably wrong. The building's namesake is almost certainly A. J. Dittenhoefer (note the "oe."). He was one of New York's hardcore Republicans, having been involved in the campaigns to elect
Lincoln. He was a judge, and later, more famously, something of a Gilded Age celebrity lawyer, successfully defending Enrico Caruso charges of sexual molestation, and The Metropolitan Opera Company against Cosima Wagner and Siegfried Wagner, who sought to prevent all staged performances of Richard Wagner's Parsifal outside of Bayreuth. And that's really all that I can say about the building--what Dittenhoefer was doing with a cast-iron as lovely as this, sadly, I don't know.

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.

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.

77. House at 203 Prince Street

Location: 203 Prince Street
Built: 1833-34
Architects: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001731
Listed: May 26, 1983
Visited: June 1, 2008



203 is considered to be designed in a "transitional" style that borrows elements of Federal buildings James Brown House or 83-85 Sullivan and later Greek Revival ones. It sure seems a little showier, a little more genteel than those two, but apart from the interior, which I obviously can't view, documentation on the building cites the main Greek Revival elements as the cap moldings on the moldings--so this building distinguishes itself from other Federal Style buildings in ways that are totally lost on an uneducated doof like myself. Sure is nice, though. It immediately registers as a home in a way the others don't: blinds may be drawn, but there are stained glass pieces in some of the window panes.

Aaron Burr had a mansion round these parts, and its gateway stood where 203 now is. We'll get to the mansion next week when I cover the Charlton-King-Vandam district. But it summons the delicious sci-fi idea that on this land, maybe even inside this house, the gateway still stands, a portal to the ghost New York City that lives unseen alongside the New York City we can sense.

Oh hey, it's my birthday.

76. Houses at 83 and 85 Sullivan Street

Location: 83-85 Sullivan Street
Built: 1819
Architects: Unknown
National Register Number: 80002696
Listed: November 17, 1980
Visited: June 1, 2008



Is anybody living here? 85 Sullivan's door has a computer-printed sticker you'd think a tenant, pissed at the vandalism of an authetic Federal Style row house, would've peeled away long ago; but no, while scraped at the edges, it's otherwise intact and weather-beaten. On 83's door, sky blue and framed by columns, there's a crispy Christmas wreath still hanging six months after the holiday season. Are they undergoing subtle renovations? Are folks summering out in the Hamptons? Do the neighborhood kids think they're haunted, much like my childhood self used to think the old and hollow pre-war homes on my suburban street were? So curious.