SoHo, Manhattan
SoHo, Manhattan
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2293825

SoHo, Manhattan

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2293825

SoHo, Manhattan

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SoHo, Manhattan

SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as the Wall, and has also been known for its variety of shops ranging from trendy upscale boutiques to national and international chain store locations. The area's history is an archetypal example of inner-city regeneration and gentrification, encompassing socioeconomic, cultural, political, and architectural developments.

The name "SoHo" derives from the area being "South of Houston Street", and was coined in 1962 by Chester Rapkin, an urban planner and author of The South Houston Industrial Area study, also known as the "Rapkin Report". The name also recalls Soho, an area in London's West End.

Almost all of SoHo is included in the SoHo–Cast Iron Historic District, which was designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1973, extended in 2010, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978. It consists of 26 blocks and approximately 500 buildings, many of them incorporating cast-iron architectural elements. Many side streets in the district are paved with Belgian blocks.

SoHo is part of Manhattan Community District 2 and its primary ZIP Codes are 10012 and 10013. It is patrolled by the 1st and 5th Precincts of the New York City Police Department.

Because of the nature of neighborhoods in New York City, different sources will often give different boundaries for each one. In the case of SoHo, all sources appear to agree that the northern boundary is Houston Street, and the southern boundary is Canal Street, but the location of the eastern and western boundaries is disputed.

In 1974, shortly after SoHo first came into existence, The New York Times described the boundaries as "stretching from Houston to Canal Streets between West Broadway and Lafayette Street" – a definition it continued to hold to in 2016 – but The Encyclopedia of New York City reports that SoHo is bounded by Crosby Street on the east, and Sixth Avenue to the west. These are the same boundaries shown by Google Maps. However, the AIA Guide to New York City gives the western boundary of SoHo north of Broome Street as being West Broadway, and New York magazine gives the eastern boundary as Lafayette Street and the western boundary as the Hudson River.

The map at the Community Board 2 profile page on New York City's official website has "SOHO" written near Broadway in the space roughly equidistant between Houston Street and Canal Street.

In the 1990s, real estate agents began giving an adjacent neighborhood below West Houston Street various appellations, with no general agreement on whether it should be called (or included as part of) West SoHo, Hudson Square or the South Village. The AIA Guide calls that neighborhood "An intersection of brick and glass, searching for an identity", and refers to the western section of it as "The Glass Box District". Unlike Hudson Square, the South Village has traditionally appeared on maps of Community District 2, centered near the intersection of Houston Street and Avenue of the Americas. The more recent map of Community District 2 contains both the South Village and Hudson Square, with the latter written in the area below Houston Street, between Hudson Street and the Hudson River.

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