How SoHo Got Its Groove Back The First Time
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Before the streets of SoHo were lined with brands like Moncler or Louis Vuitton, the now-touristy neighborhood was full of blue collar warehouse workers, and industrialists. The Cast-Iron District, named for the wrought iron used in the foundation and facades of the buildings, was created to support the storage for the city’s factories. In The Lofts of Soho by Aaron Shkuda, the historian dives into what happened next, the revival of a neighborhood from manufacturing locale to a networked artist community.
With the advent of the 60s, people flocked to Soho for the cheap rent and wide open spaces to set up shop and live in their respective art studios and galleries. Through the 1980s, the neighborhood became an epicenter of modern art, and therefore of style and culture. Look back at any distinction from that time and see what the neighborhood begat: Donald Judd, Martin Scorcese’s After Hours, the first Saturday Night Live afterparties, and so much more.
“The industrial loft as a space has a very important history here,” says Shkuda, a professor at Princeton. “Artists moved in and saw these wide open spaces, sometimes without even a bathroom, and used their networks to make something out of them.” As far as the layout of the buildings are concerned, Shkuda’s architectural history sees the throughline to today as well: unfinished floors, brick walls, movable partitions, and exposed lighting. Perfect for a makeshift art gallery at the time. “Today though, it’s also the layout of every Chipotle,” Shkuda says with a laugh. Thus is the trajectory of taste, though — what the artist class creates will eventually be seized upon by business. “In the mid-60s, people didn’t really see a value in lost buildings that had been abandoned manufacturing facilities,” says Shkuda. “Artists saw the value in these properties and were able to reuse them for their own means. This also runs parallel with the historic preservation movement happening in the city around this time.”
If you’ve ever seen a proto-republican business student lugging around a copy of The Power Broker (Well, first, run, but if you can’t…) you’ll know that as long as there has been art, there has been someone trying to capitalize on it in the name of modernization. In the 60s, this meant Robert Moses, who was trying to build a cross-city highway through Soho (among other neighborhoods) while neighborhood activists — to name one, his nemesis Jane Jacobs, fought to protect the history of the neighborhood. These warehouses turned galleries and studios went on to become the catalysts for a new era of the neighborhood.
The movement of Soho’s rebirth as an artistic place also created a new era of interior design and architecture. The birth of the “open floor plan,” as it pertains to apartment living, becomes becomes desirable. According to Shkuda’s research, the lofts become the case study in gentrifying a neighborhood — not just in the displacement of people but in the revitalizing and recycling of buildings’ uses.