80e. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Like Lord & Taylor and Bloomingdale's, Arnold, Constable & Company was one of those humble New York purveyors of "dry goods" of Old New York that eventually built full-fldged department stores; unlike its aforementioned competitors, it didn't make into the 21st Century. It started in 1825, giving it a 150-year run of serving American royalty:

Along with many another notable, President Hoover last week sent a congratulatory letter to William C. Creamer, octogenarian silk salesman of Manhattan's Arnold, Constable & Co. Salesman Creamer remembers selling silk by the yard to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. Ulysses Simpson Grant, recalls seeing Theodore Roosevelt brought to the store by his mother.

307-311 Canal Street may not look like much now (though a sympathetic renovation is underway), but this 1856 building was the company's attempt at a jawdropper showcase, a "Marble House" built in obvious reaction to A.T. Stewart's much larger "Marble Palace" half a mile down Broadway, built a decade before. (Though Tom Fletcher says the Arnold, Constable building as faced with limestone, though, and the LPC report noncommittally says it's "stone.") As luck would have it, when Arnold, Constable finished an expansion to this store in 1862, A.T. Stewart would leapfrog up to Broadway and Ninth Street in deference to New York's overall northward vibe migration.



After several more moves of its own, Arnold Constable eventually wound up at Fifth Avenue at 40th Street before it passed away in 1975. How something can accrue 150 years of experience and then just expire feels like a mystery to me. Well, not really: a few years of bad decisions can wipe out any business no matter how old, and what worked in 1856 won't necessarily work in 1929 or 1947 or 1975, obviously. Even so, the sense that institutions, no matter how old, are actually vulnerable offends an intuitive sense that they can and will just...well...remain once an undefined threshold is reached, as if age is a sufficient bulwark against changing markets and competition.