The largest collection of cast-iron architecture in the world, saved from a motorway by Jane Jacobs, filled with artists, and now filled with shops.
Why the buildings look like that
Cast iron was cheap, could be moulded into ornament that would have taken a stonemason months, and could be bolted together fast. Between about 1850 and 1880 a whole district of warehouses and shops went up in it, with façades imitating Venetian palazzi and Corinthian orders in painted metal.
The other advantage was structural: iron columns are thin, so you could have enormous windows. The buildings have far more glass than a masonry building of the same date, which is why the interiors are so light — and why artists later wanted them.
Around 250 cast-iron buildings survive in the district, the largest concentration anywhere in the world.
Nearly a motorway
By the 1960s the district was semi-derelict manufacturing, nicknamed Hell’s Hundred Acres for its fire record, and Robert Moses planned the Lower Manhattan Expressway straight through it — a ten-lane elevated road along Broome Street connecting the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge. Jane Jacobs led the opposition, was arrested at a public hearing, and the plan was finally killed in 1969.
By then artists had already moved into the empty lofts illegally, drawn by cheap space and light. The city legalised live-work occupancy for certified artists in 1971 and the neighbourhood got its name — SOuth of HOuston — and its landmark designation in 1973.
The artists were priced out within twenty years, which is the usual arc, and the galleries mostly moved to Chelsea in the 1990s.
Shopping now
Broadway is the mass-market spine — the chains, and busy. The interesting shopping is west of it: Greene, Mercer, Wooster, Crosby, Prince and Spring Streets, with designer flagships, Japanese and Scandinavian labels, independent perfumers, and a lot of very good homeware.
Prince Street on a Saturday has a street market of jewellery and art along the railings.
There is no shortage of coffee and the food is generally good and generally expensive.
The walk
The architecture is best on Greene Street, which has a continuous run of ironwork and the Belgian block paving that once covered the whole district. The Haughwout Building at Broadway and Broome, 1857, had the first passenger safety lift Elisha Otis ever installed in a commercial building.
Look for the Little Singer Building on Prince, and the enormous painted wall mural on Houston at Broadway, which changes every few months.
More Shopping & Markets
Fifth Avenue
The eleven blocks between Rockefeller Center and Central Park hold the most expensive retail rents in the world. Window shopping is free and the windows are the point.
Chelsea Market
The factory where the Oreo was invented, turned into a food hall on the ground floor and Google's New York offices upstairs.
Macy's Herald Square
A million square feet of department store with wooden escalators from 1902 still running on the upper floors. Free to ride, and almost nobody does.