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SoHo: Mecca of Advanced Taste (1986)

Until the 1970s, the area of Manhattan just south of Houston Street and east of West Broadway was an industrial slum. The industries housed here were declining--rag wholesaling, cardboard boxes, clothing manufacture, etc.; thus, many of its old factory buildings had empty floors. Artists, painters mostly, needing largish space in which to do their work rented these lofts; some even purchased whole buildings, thus beginning the transformation of the slum, once called "Hell's Hundred Acres" among other derogations, into "SoHo," meaning south of Houston Street, a neighborhood officially bounded also by Broadway on the east and Canal Street on the south, although culturally extending beyond it to the south and a bit into the east and southwest into Tribeca.

Behind the pioneering artists came the art galleries, beginning with Paula Cooper and O. K. Harris in the late sixties, and then came the clothing boutiques and the modish restaurants, in sum creating by the 1980s a neighborhood quite unlike any other in New York City, if not all America, my European friends tell me, because of its base on the creation and merchandizing of high-class taste. In its mix of the shabby with the chic, with cracked sidewalk pavement and cobblestone streets, with its plateglass displays at the base of industrial buildings, SoHo looks at once too poor and too plush and thus forbidding, to native New Yorkers as well as tourists here; but it is not inscrutable nor uninviting.

By law as well as fact, SoHo is still a manufacturing district from Monday to Friday. This accounts for why street parking is forbidden on weekdays from 8 in the morning to 6 at night and why large trucks tie up its streets from early morning until the late afternoon when factory workers empty out of its buildings. For that reason, people touring its galleries and its shops, as well as people watching people, prefer to come on Saturday, which is also the favorite opening day for many exhibitions. As many of the most interesting galleries are closed on Sunday, it is a less attractive day for seeing art, though acceptable for such pastimes as shopping and people-watching.

It is hard for us now to remember how different this neighborhood was only two decades ago. Back in 1971, an article in Time magazine noted, "When the warehouses close at 6 p.m., and the steel doors [of the factories] close, the streets go dead. There are no decent restaurants between Houston and the trattoire on Grand Street, five blocks south [in Little Italy]." The anonymous reporter continued, "There are no boutiques, no sleazy head shops hustling Moroccan love beads made in Jersey City to tourists from Duluth, no taxis, no clubs." To understand how SoHo became what it is, we must know its recent history.

Because SoHo is still zoned for light manufacturing, it has not been legal for most people to live here. To acknowledge the presence of certain urban pioneers, the city ruled fifteen years ago that professional artists could get a residential variance, a legal document entitling them to live here, if they demonstrated a need for loft space by presenting evidence of art as their principal profession--slides, audiotapes, resumes, reviews--along with references attesting to their career. Since the need for large space was the governing criterion, only certain kinds of artists were acceptable. Painters, sculptors, architects, composers, choreographers, filmmakers and playwrights were okay; but poets and novelists, say, were not. Curiously, these rules remain today, even though they are not so scrupulously honored.

As no one lived here before the artists came (indeed, as only a visionary few thought that industrial spaces could be made habitable), no one was pushed out of his or her home; no one cohabited the neighborhood in tension with the newcomers. That accounts for why a dozen years ago SoHo was a one-industry town within a larger city. That industry was contemporary art. It was produced here, critical reputations were made here, and it was sold here. By the mid-1970s, many of the most prominent uptown galleries had established here exhibition spaces several times the size of their previous showrooms on 57th Street or the Upper East Side. (Remember that the giant canvases of pop art were first displayed in the equivalent of brownstone parlor rooms on the Upper East Side.)

The density of galleries complemented the density of artists, producing in sum a kind of esthetic hothouse whose nurture was palpable. To SoHo came artists and (aspiring artists) from all over the world. As they came to see and hear about contemporary art, the neighborhood became a de facto university. (The best memorial of this earlier time is the bilingual book-length catalogue produced for a 1975 exhibition not in New York but at the Akademie der Kunst in West Berlin!) Individual residential buildings were customarily known by the name of their most famous artist (who wasn't necessarily the wealthiest); and since everybody knew each other or, at least, about each other, the joke was you could never have a surreptitious affair in SoHo. If an artist, especially a well-known one, were seen entering a building not his or her own several times in a week, the neighbors would ask each other why. The anonymity typical of big-city life wasn't possible in SoHo, which had the character of a small town within the larger city.

As SoHo is small, essentially five blocks by four, it can be toured on foot. The best way to visit the galleries is to begin at SoHo's northwest corner of Houston and West Broadway (which becomes La Guardia Place, once the north-south street extends above Houston). People who have never toured commercial art galleries before should know that, unlike museums, they never charge admission. Those who have toured galleries uptown should know that those in Soho are more spacious, with larger rooms and taller ceilings, and less funereal. Even if you have particular tastes, visit as many as you can; it won't take long.

On West Broadway, walk downtown towards the World Trade Center, which will be visible in front of you. As SoHo's widest thoroughfare, because the Sixth Avenue elevated ran above it, West Broadway is the main street, the neighborhood's only true promenade, with people seeing and being seen, with some dressed like artists walking beside those dressed as collectors. On the left at 465 is Vorpal, a gallery featuring decorative art; it inherited the space that O.K. Harris pioneered in 1969. Cross Prince Street, and you will be in a denser concentration of galleries. On the left, or east side of West Broadway, is Nancy Hoffman's space and then Mary Boone's, housed within a recently renovated truck garage, and then a taller building that houses several galleries, including Witkin which, when still uptown, was the premier showcase for artistic photography.

Directly across the street is 420 West Broadway, which is filled from top to bottom with spacious galleries--Charles Cowles on the top floor, the 49th Parallel (owned by the Canadian government) on the fourth floor, Ileana Sonnabend on the third floor, Leo Castelli on the second floor, and Germans van Eck on the ground floor. Cross Spring Street, continuing south, and on the east side at 393 is the Dia Foundation with Walter de Maria's "Broken Kilometer" as a permanent installation (that isn't for sale) and the present location of O.K. Harris Gallery, with its four separate exhibition spaces in several thousand square feet. Go down to Broome Street, turn left, and walk two blocks east to Greene Street, and turn left again, and you will see galleries on both sides of the street, some of them one flight up. Especially on Greene Street are magnificent examples of the cast-iron industrial architecture that was popular a century ago.

As Greene Street crosses Prince notice on a west wall a Richard Haas's trompe d'oeil mural of a cast-iron facade. (Look carefully, or you might miss it.) Near the top of Greene Street is Leo Castelli's new space, with taller ceilings than his West Broadway gallery and thus particularly suitable for monumental works (by James Rosenquist, Richard Serra, Keith Haring, et al.), and then Metro Pictures, a newer gallery with mostly younger artists. Once you get to Houston Street, turn left and walk one block west to Wooster Street, where Paula Cooper's present gallery is just below Houston Street. After checking the new galleries directly across the street from it, go back to Houston, turn right and walk two blocks east to Mercer Street, and turn right again to find galleries on both sides of the street. Or go one block further to Broadway, and turn right to visit the spacious New Museum.

At the other end of Mercer Street, down near its base on Canal, is another major gallery, Ronald Feldman's, favoring conceptual art and its successors, in addition to the Museum of Holography, which was established over a decade ago as the first of its kind. As this summary is scarcely comprehensive, one more bit of advice is in order. When you walk through SoHo, always look around for cloth banners and signs announcing other galleries, many of them brand-new, and don't hesitate to follow people who seem to know where they are going. The more people you see in a gallery, or going to a gallery, the more interesting is the place likely to be. In the visual art community, word-of-mouth recommendations are more persuasive at getting people to see (and buy) than advertisements or even a gallery's "reputation." No other place in the world has so much current art within a few square blocks; and except for the two museums, it's all free. (Old art, needless to say, is best seen, or sold, elsewhere in the City.)

Once these galleries attracted art-lovers in droves, other kinds of institutions arrived, catering to their tastes. The best bookstore in the City for volumes about contemporary art around the world is Jaap Reitman's, previously located on the corner of West Broadway and Spring, but now upstairs at 134 Spring, between Wooster and Greene. If its stock epitomizes the old SoHo, the newer interests in fashion and food, as well as contemporary literature, are featured at Spring Books, also on Spring Street, but just west of West Broadway. For imaginatively designed books by contemporary artists, there is Printed Matter, a storefront at 7 Lispenard Street, one block south of Canal Street, parallel to it, and east of West Broadway. A Photographer's Place at 135 Mercer Street specializes in books of and about photography, while Sohozat at 307 West Broadway, just north of Canal, has comics and other relics of an earlier counterculture.

For an elaborate stock of artist' supplies, there is Pearl's Paints, on the south side of Canal Street just opposite the base of Mercer Street. Every night except Sunday and Monday, beginning a half hour after dark, you can see on the wall of a factory building on Spring Street, just west of Broadway, another SoHo institution--an illuminated show fifty feet square, free to all, of changing "artist-made slides" sponsored by Red Spot, which also broadcasts on 98.6 f.m. ("Body Temperature Radio") a low-wattage signal that can be heard on radios only within the viewing area.

As you walk through SoHo, you will see poster stores selling replicas of contemporary (and classic) art at more affordable prices; you will see stylish furniture stores, jewelry stores (some feature "wearable sculpture"), and other applied art emporia, most of them with less uniform, more eccentric stock than you find elsewhere. Down at 33 Wooster Street is the Performing Garage, which remains a premier showcase for avant-garde theater. At 433 West Broadway is John Dellaria Salon, a hairhouse that looks like a fashion showroom; on Prince Street, between Wooster and Greene, are side by side a densely stocked gourmet food gallery (Dean and DiLuca) and a health food store (Whole Foods) that is nearly as elaborate.

The most distracting storefronts are boutiques for men and women (and even children), and their clothing is usually more theatrical and more reflective of contemporary art than that found elsewhere in the city. The key terms are "interesting" and "expensive," at times outrageously so, on both counts. Among the favorite places for women are Paracelso at 414 West Broadway, which has piles of imports from exotic places; Diane B. at 426 West Broadway and 102 Wooster Street; and at 118 Wooster Street Comme des Garcons, a starkly designed spacious solon constructed wholly of cement, with expensive clothing for both men and women. For more extreme tastes, there is the Gallery of Wearable Art on upper West Broadway; especially on Saturdays it sometimes installs live models in its windows. For men alone are several stores on West Broadway between Prince and Spring; and for children, there is Wendy's, at 131 Wooster Street. With so many boutiques in competition with each other, they come and go, fashion being fashion, faster than art galleries; but just as you can see all of SoHo's art in a single afternoon, so you can check out all its clothing boutiques with equal dispatch. One implicit guide to these stores is the advertisements in the large-format book, SoHo: A Guide. A Documentary (1986).

As SoHo, still officially an industrial neighborhood, has parking regulations typical of a commercial district, it becomes, every weekday night at six and all day on weekends, a great free parking lot. As a result, on top of an older collection of restaurants, catering mostly to factory workers and then artists, came a second tier catering mostly to people driving there from elsewhere. Among the latter the first on West Broadway was O-So-Ho, an essentially Cantonese restaurant with an unusual, if not eccentric, menu. Two blocks east and parallel is the SoHo Kitchen with its huge centerpiece bar and, adjacent to it, the Greene Street Café with open interior and extremely tall ceilings similar to the Castelli Gallery on the next block. Both feature nouvelle cuisine, which is more expensive at the latter. Between Wooster and West Broadway on Spring Street is the New Deal, where a full dinner for two would run close to $100. Chanterelle at 86 Grand Street, at the corner of Greene, is yet more expensive. On Broome Street, just east of West Broadway, is Amazonas, a medium-priced Brazilian restaurant. Towards the southern end of West Broadway are The Cupping Room, a modest coffee house that expanded into a restaurant; Cinco de Mayo, a fancier Mexican restaurant, and Tamu, a splendid Indonesian restaurant. Utterly unique is Shalom Japan, a glatt kosher Japanese restaurant (that's no misprint), at 22 Wooster Street, just south of Grand. Otherwise, for Italian food, walk east into Little Italy; for Chinese food, walk southeast across Canal into Chinatown; and for Indian food, walk northeast to Second Avenue and Sixth Street.

Among the older watering holes the artists' favorite has always been, notwithstanding its modest cuisine, Fanelli's, on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets. With photographs of pugilists on its walls and a television whose sound is turned down, it has kept its former character, even through new ownership. Two blocks down Prince on Wooster Street is an informal restaurant known only as Food, initially begun as an artists' cooperative. It favors inexpensive vegetarian dishes and has a remarkably good poppyseed cake. On West Broadway and Broome is Kenn's, whose specialty is hamburgers. On the southeast corner of Spring and West Broadway is the Spring Street Restaurant and Bar once favored by artists, especially for post-midnight gabfests; but its character changed, along with its clientele, several years ago. People who understand changing neighborhoods predict a conflagration between the newer SoHo and the old, which feels itself getting pushed out, especially by "the Saturday afternoon zoo," as one neighbor calls it; but that hasn't happened yet.

Several routes of public transportation can get you to SoHo: the # 5 bus, whose run down Fifth Avenue terminates at Houston and West Broadway (the best place to begin a walking tour); the R line of the BMT stops at Broadway and Prince (where 568 Broadway on the northeast corner was recently renovated to house several galleries) and then again at Broadway and Canal; the K and E trains of the IND stop at Spring Street at Sixth Avenue and then again, along with the A express, at Canal Street, at West Broadway in the southwest corner of SoHo, while the # 6 local of the IRT stops at Bleecker Street, Spring Street and Canal Street, as they cross Lafayette Street, two blocks east of Broadway. Now, unlike before, you can always find a taxi here; and now, unlike before, when you tell a taxi driver elsewhere that you want, say, "Wooster Street," he's not likely to ask you where it is.

There are no discothèques in Soho any more, in part because any noise after midnight brings protests from the resident homeowners. There are no hotels, though several developers have announced plans to build one here. The nearest ones are the Washington Square Hotel several blocks to the north, and the Vista International at the World Trade Center several blocks to the south. Should you want to stay in SoHo for long, consider subletting a loft. As many artists are often away teaching or fulfilling commissions, their loft apartments can be sublet for odd periods. (It is legal for a resident artist to sublet to a nonartist.) Subletting is especially desirable to artists teaching in the provinces, who come to SoHo to assimilate its esthetic intelligence during their sabbaticals or vacations. The basic rates are not cheap, but you never know what kind of deal can be worked out between one considerate human being and another, especially if the care of flowers or pets or mail is involved. One should warn that loft buildings here were renovated to a far less efficient level than most houses. As many elevators are still manually operated, you may need to do lots of walking up and down stairs when it is not available at your floor; and then these elevators break down more frequently than those in modern apartment buildings, say, or office buildings. Heating in SoHo can be uneven and intercoms often go dead. There is a good reason why few people over sixty-five live here; it is simply too difficult.

From the historical point of view, the interesting thing about SoHo is that nobody planned it to become this way. There were no city policies mandating this or that, no subsidies to manipulate behavior, no major developers to systematize reconstruction. The "Arts Councils" had no effect. As late as the 1960s, it was often said that most of the industrial slum should be razed for an expressway connecting Brooklyn to New Jersey; some of its northern edges were razed a few years earlier for the expansion of Houston Street. Precisely because Hell's Hundred Acres was open territory, the pioneers came, and behind these artists came the culture that is here now--an assortment of enterprises claiming advanced taste. In touring through SoHo now, you can see how it became a model for renovations elsewhere of industrial slums, not only in America but elsewhere in Europe; for as the art produced here has become accepted elsewhere, so have other kinds of significant tastes.