Cast-iron warehouses, Belgian block streets and a hundred and fifty years of the same cycle: industry, then artists, then shops.
The cycle
SoHo has run the same loop three times. It was a fashionable residential district in the 1840s, then an industrial one from the 1860s when the cast-iron warehouses went up, then semi-derelict by the 1950s, then artists’ lofts in the 1960s and 70s, then galleries, then flagship retail, and now, increasingly, apartments again for people who could have bought anywhere.
The artists who made the name — living illegally in unheated manufacturing lofts, which the city legalised in 1971 — were gone within two decades. Donald Judd’s building at 101 Spring Street is preserved as he left it and is open by booked tour; it is the single best way to understand what those lofts actually were.
Walking it
The cast-iron architecture is the reason to be here and it is the best on Greene Street, which has the longest continuous run and original Belgian block paving.
Mercer, Wooster and Crosby are the quieter parallel streets and the ones locals use.
Broadway is the mass-market spine: crowded, chain-heavy, and the least interesting street in the neighbourhood.
Prince and Spring cross east–west and carry most of the good independent retail and the street vendors.
Around the edges
Nolita — North of Little Italy — is the small grid east of Lafayette around Elizabeth and Mott Streets. Smaller shops, better restaurants, fewer people. St Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry is the original 1815 cathedral, with a walled graveyard and catacombs you can tour.
Hudson Square, west of Sixth Avenue, is former printing warehouses now full of offices.
Tribeca, south of Canal, is the same architecture with a tenth of the crowd and considerably more money.
Little Italy has shrunk to about three blocks of Mulberry Street, which are almost entirely restaurants trading on the name. The real Italian food in New York is elsewhere; the Feast of San Gennaro in September is still worth seeing.
Chinatown starts immediately south and east and is the more interesting neighbour.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.