SOHO

Description

Essentials about SoHo in brief

SoHo is one of the trendiest, but also most charming neighborhoods in Manhattan. Due to its great architecture with many old warehouse and factory buildings in cast iron construction, which are now listed, its excellent shopping opportunities and its great gallery scene, SoHo is definitely worth a walk.

The location of SoHo

The name “SoHo” is an abbreviation for “South of Houston Street” and a reference to the trendy London neighborhood of the same name. Houston Street is the northern boundary of SoHo. To the south, SoHo extends to Canal Street. The eastern and western boundaries are Crosby St and 6th Avenue. SoHo thus lies between the neighborhoods of Greenwich Village to the north, Tribeca to the south, and Little Italy to the east.

The history of SoHo

The first settlements on the hilly moorland of SoHo were established at the end of the 18th century, when Broadway, which until then had ended in the area of Canal Street south of SoHo, was extended northward by Dutch settlers. In the first half of the 19th century, Manhattan’s wealthy residential population increasingly settled in what is now SoHo, thus attracting the establishment of a wide variety of commercial enterprises within a short period of time. Hotels, theaters, upscale stores and stately tenements sprouted up like mushrooms, creating a diverse and vibrant social life.

The district of SoHo in its present architectural appearance finally emerged around the period 1850 to 1890, when the residential population increasingly moved on to Manhattan’s more northerly neighborhoods and the textile industry in particular established production and warehousing facilities in SoHo. The area developed into a run-down slum where factory workers labored for low pay and under poor conditions in the so-called sweatshops. In the 1960s, new labor regulations put an end to these circumstances, leading to a virtual flight of the manufacturing sector from SoHo, and with it a widespread orphaning of the entire district.

Over the course of the 1960s, the largely vacant industrial buildings, which were left to a slow decay, were increasingly occupied by young artists and freelancers, who set up extremely inexpensive studios and spacious loft apartments on the large open floors formerly used for manufacturing purposes. The generation of young, up-and-coming artists and intellectuals pioneered the reclamation of the district as a place to live, creating a new kind of attractive environment that set in motion a strong gentrification process. Extensive redevelopment and modernization over the course of the 1970s and 1980s created coveted and expensive residential and commercial space, with rents that are now among the highest in New York City. Many of SoHo’s former residents were displaced from their traditional neighborhoods as a result.

The Cast-Iron Historic District

The architectural core of SoHo is the so-called Cast-Iron Historic District with its cast-iron warehouse and factory buildings typical of the American founding period at the end of the 19th century. Of the approximately 250 Cast-Iron buildings preserved in Manhattan, most are located in SoHo. However, this cultural treasure was almost lost when an expressway was planned across SoHo in 1962 to provide better access between northern and southern Manhattan. After massive protests by SoHo residents, these plans were abandoned in 1968.

Cast iron was initially used as a decorative element. The iron elements were industrially prefabricated and used to give a modern, decorative character to older buildings in the style of historicism of the time. Later, the use of cast-iron facades developed into a central, supporting structural feature of buildings. Their load-bearing structure allowed for large window areas, and the absence of masonry facades reduced construction costs and allowed for very short construction periods of a few months. The interiors were made larger and more functional by the use of slender, cast-iron columns. In keeping with the style of the time, the façade structures were cast with offsets from French and Italian Baroque and Renaissance buildings, which were painted white or beige to give them the appearance of a stone façade.

In the heyday of cast-iron architecture, it was thought that cast iron was more solid and fireproof than steel. Cast-iron facades were therefore often built in front of wooden buildings. However, it was discovered that iron gave way under the influence of heat just like steel and cracked as soon as it came into contact with fire-fighting water. In 1899, new building codes were enacted that required cast-iron facades to be backed by solid masonry. Many of the surviving Cast-Iron buildings in SoHo were constructed using this principle. Because of its famous architecture, many movies, TV series and commercials are still filmed for SoHo’s building backdrop.

The artist scene of SoHo

To this day, SoHo is known for its artist scene, which emerged in the 1960s. Protagonists of the Fluxus and experimental film scenes met here to hold gatherings of poetry readings, happenings, and performance art in the run-down and vacant factory floors. In the 1970s, a movement of avant-garde jazz musicians converged on New York City, creating numerous jazz clubs in SoHo where famous jazz personalities performed their art for low fees. The avant-garde era finally ended slowly toward the end of the 1970s, when the clubs became more commercial and SoHo became too expensive for “the scene.”

Since then, SoHo has increasingly developed into a tourist center and shopping mile for lovers of high-end fashion labels. International fashion groups in particular have a presence in SoHo with prestigious branches, which drove rents for the long-established artist scene to heights that are no longer affordable. Although there are no longer many artists with studios in SoHo, the neighborhood still has a very lively art trade scene with well over a hundred, mostly avant-garde galleries and numerous antique dealers.