80b. 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



Before the chains, before the artists, before the textile concerns and the cast-irons, SoHo was filled little Federal Style buildings like 107 Spring Street. It's the oldest building in the district, at least two hundred years exactly. Apart from its survivor status, its relative integrity as a building after all this time, there appears to be nothing special about it. Why it lives when grander buildings got are just landfill is a mystery; perhaps it survived through stealth, its blandness serving as camouflage.

Those shoes. Hmm. I have never understood why people throw shoes up on telephone wires--but since this is SoHo, I have to assume it's part of some incomprehensible viral ad for Nike.



The second-oldest building? Right around the corner. The LPC Report says "No. 105 [Mercer Street] was built in 1819-20 as a residence for Mary Boddy, a seamstress" and follows it with some architectural bloviation and that's it. A mysterious PDF file on a real estate website adds sexy sexual SEX to its history: the building was for a time a brothel run by a Cinderella Marshall. (What a perfect first name.) It tuns out that after the Federal style houses and before (and during) the cast-irons, the area west of Broadway became notorious as a market for love for sale. Author Marilynn Wood Hill notes wryly:

"No part of New York better exemplified mixed land use. Churches were across the street from brothels, police stations were next door, and, when the National Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1841, it toppled onto the brothel of Julia Brown, partially destroying that establishment and killing one resident prostitute."

105 may not have served as a brothel for long. Hill argues that prostitution in New York City was unconstrained by any geographic location, and was often on the move, following clientèle, fleeing the law, and just relocating almost for the sake of relocating as was common in New York City in those days. (The first of May functioned as something of an unofficial moving holiday.) Everything was moving further and further uptown, all manner of commerce included; by the 1870s, the streets that once boasted some of the city's toniest brothels had sunk to levels of depravity almost as bad as Five Points.

Today, the red lights seem to have settled around Midtown. According to Gridskipper, most of them are between 40th and 59th Streets.