Since the mid-1960s, SoHo, the grid of streets that runs So uth of Ho uston Street, has meant art. As the West Village 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 living.

Yet although SoHo now carries the veneer 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 drove 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 seen.

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. Greene Street is a great place to start, highlighted all along by the nineteenth-century cast-iron facades that, in part if not in whole, saved 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.

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 heavy walls carrying the weight of the floors. The result was the removal of load-bearing walls, greater space for windows and remarkably decorative 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 Greene St , an extravagance whose Corinthian portico stretches its entire five 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 Greene 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 sliver of a mock-Venetian 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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