Soho and neighboring Noho’s Landmark Historic Districts boast the world’s largest collection of cast iron buildings, most from the late 19th Century, where they served as warehouses and textile factories for New York’s manufacturing hub.
Soho is an incredible time capsule of this architecture. The loft buildings’ intricate facades offered an innovative alternative to carved stone for the Greek columns and other decorative architectural elements which are iconic of this landmarked area.
Once the 1960s brought the decline of manufacturing in New York City, Soho was largely abandoned and empty. This created the opportunity of low rents for a new generation of artists and musicians who began to settle in the area. Attracted to the massive floor plates, artists began converting spaces in Soho into live-work studios and apartments. The Artist-in-Residence or A.I.R. occupancy designation is still on the books, which allows for artists to live in their working studio factory lofts. The area became the global center of the Art world up until the 1980s. Today, luxury retail and restaurants occupy the ground floors in what has become one of Manhattan’s most vibrant and desirable neighborhoods. Soho is located on South of Houston Street, north of Canal, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway.
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Nolita’s evolution was greatly influenced by the adaptive reuse and rise in value of the properties in neighboring Soho; but the area has its own distinct architectural character of more modest, working-class tenements. A northern extension of New York’s ‘Little Italy’, its predominantly Italian-American residents sold their choicely located buildings in the 1980s and 1990s, as a population of young urban professionals priced out of Soho sought out more affordable downtown homes. The acronym ‘Nolita’, which stands for ‘North of Little Italy’, became the vernacular neighborhood description in the 1990s reflecting its changing character. It spans the 16 blocks west of Soho to the Bowery. A stroll through the lively neighborhood is delightful with fashionable boutiques, trendy eateries and bakeries side-by-side with long established old school Italian restaurants.
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