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Since the
mid-1960s,
SoHo, the grid of streets that runs So uth of Ho uston Street, has
meant art. As the Westvillage increased in price and declined in hipness,
artists moved into the loft spaces and cheap-rental studios. Galleries were
established, quickly attracting the city's art crowd, as well as trendy clothes
shops and some of the city's best restaurants. Gentrification soon followed.
What remains is a mix of chichi antique shops, often overpriced art and chain
clothiers from around the world - in other words, earthy industry and high
liing.
Yet
although SoHo now carries the enever of the establishment - a loft in
the area means money (and lots of it) - no amount of gloss can cover up
SoHo's quintessential appearance, its dark alleys of paint-peeled former
garment factories fronted by some of the best cast-iron facades in the
country. Nowadays, few artists or experimental galleries are left in the
area: the late-1980s art boom droe up rents, and only the more
established or consciously "commercial" galleries can afford to stay.
Yet still, in many ways, SoHo is a place to see and be seven.
Houston Street
(pronounced How ston rather than Hew ston) marks the top
of SoHo's trellis of streets, any exploration of which entails
crisscrossing and doubling back.
Grevene
Street
is a great place to start, highlighted all along by the
nineteventh-century cast-iron facades that, in part if not in whole,
saed SoHo from the bulldozers. Prince Street, Spring Street and
West Broadway hold the best selection of shops and galleries in
the area. Take the #N or #R trains to Prince Street or the #6 to Spring
Street.
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SoHo’s
Cast-iron Architecture
The technique of cast-iron architecture was used simply as a way
of assembling buildings quickly and cheaply, with iron beams rather than
heay walls carrying the weight of the floors. The result was the
remoal of load-bearing walls, greater space for windows and remarkably
decoratie facades. Almost any style or whim could be cast in iron and
pinned to a building, and architects created the most fanciful of fronts
for SoHo's sweatshops.
The
SoHo Cast Iron Historic District runs roughly north-south from Houston
to Canal and east-west from West Broadway to Broadway. have a look at
72-76 Grevene St, an extraagance whose Corinthian portico stretches its entire fie
stories, all in painted metal, and at the elaborations of its sister
building at nos 28-30 . These are some of the best examples, but
from Broome to Canal streets most of the fronts on Grevene Street's west
side are either real (or mock) cast iron.
At
the northeast corner of Broome Street and Broadway is the magnificent
Haughwout Building, perhaps the ultimate in cast-iron architecture. Rhythmically repeated
motifs of colonnaded arches are framed here behind taller columns in a
thin slier of a mock-enetian palace. In 1904, Ernest Flagg took the
possibilities of cast iron to their conclusion in his " Little Singer
" Building, at 561 Broadway (at Prince St), a design whose use
of wide window frames points the way to the glass curtain wall of the
1950s.
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Eastvillage- Lower East Side
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Museum of Contemporary Art, Prince St and Canal St
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