By the Civil War, the area had become the geographic and social center of the city. Houses and stores sprang up roads were neatened into streets fields were smoothed into city blocks. The swamp was drained in the early 19th Century-by means of a ditch dug along what is now Canal Street (never the site of an actual canal)-and urban development arrived. Later, farms and large estates grew up in the area, sprawling around a marshy patch of land known as Lispenard Swamp. The Dutch built their famous wall, for which Wall Street is named, in part to protect themselves against these prototypical SoHo-ites. In the 17th Century-when what there was of New York proper was huddled down at the tip of Manhattan Island, and Greenwich Village really was a village-what is now SoHo was occupied by the Manhattan Indians. It’s what makes their hipness genuine, or so they think. New Yorkers wouldn’t have it any other way. There are seedy-looking neighborhood tobacco shops and tiny Korean laundries reeking of carbon tetrachloride and street vendors selling junky jewelry and knockoff baseball caps. There is good design and smart merchandise and trendy food aplenty here there are also boarded-up storefronts emblazoned with graffiti and grungy loading docks and rusting scaffolding. SoHo developed organically, and its seams and blemishes still show. It has not been whitewashed or scrubbed down or subjected to the stylistic diktats of some local merchants’ association so that all the signage matches. SoHo is not Ghirardelli Square or Old Town Pasadena. Do not, in other words, expect theme-park perfection. In order to enjoy it, though, you’ve got to be in something of a New York state of mind. It is one of the few Manhattan neighborhoods that really holds together as a neighborhood, and can be enjoyed as one. However its boundaries are defined, there is no question that SoHo is its own place, a distinct part of this distinctive city, with its own atmosphere and sensibility and pace of life. In the former direction, SoHo extends to Sullivan Street, MacDougal Street or Avenue of the Americas (which New Yorkers still call by its old name, Sixth Avenue), depending on who’s counting on the other side, the line is drawn at Broadway, Crosby Street or Lafayette Street. It’s on the west and east that things get confusing. The name SoHo is an acronymic abbreviation for “south of Houston.” Its southern border, Canal Street, is equally unequivocal, because if you cross that broad boulevard you’ll find yourself in the area once called Washington Market but today known to trendy urbanites everywhere as TriBeCa, for “triangle below Canal.” The northernmost border is, by definition, Houston Street (pronounced HOUSE-ton, for reasons I’ve never heard convincingly explained). SoHo is an extended neighborhood in lower Manhattan, approximately rectangular in shape and covering somewhere between 30 and 45 blocks, depending on where you draw its boundaries. I walked over to Newsbar on West Broadway, where I perched on a stool surrounded by racks of magazines and had a large espresso and a cranberry muffin as rich and sweet as Christmas cake. Then a witchy-haired woman wearing a leather aviator’s jacket over a gossamer pink nightgown came around the corner walking a borzoi, and I remembered where I was.īy that time, the sky had turned from rose to faint yellow and then to a gas-flame watercolor of darker yellow and two shades of blue. Since SoHo is, as you may or may not know, a veritable hotbed of hip-both a cradle-cum-display case for the contemporary arts and a lodestone for the kind of too-cool, don’t-call-us-yuppie New Yorkers who prefer Anna Sui to Eddie Bauer (though both have stores in SoHo)-I found this momentary apparent innocence almost touching. I looked down on the quiet streets, faintly glistening in the autumn dampness, and thought how modest and old-fashioned SoHo looks at this time of day. But SoHo has no view-blocking skyscrapers, and the vistas are broad-a bird’s-eye landscape of rooftops, Edward Hopperish water towers, the ornate upper fringes of the facades of buildings and the occasional faded remnants of advertising signs painted on pitted brick, with the towers of the World Trade Center and the mammonist monoliths of Wall Street to the south. In Midtown, that would probably give me a view of other seventh-story windows. My office looks down on SoHo from the seventh floor. Then, before I knew it, dawn was breaking. I mean, I’m always glad to see the sun come up, considering the alternative, but I was way down here in lower Manhattan at daybreak, under professional duress. I saw the sun rise over SoHo one morning, and I wasn’t particularly happy about it.
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