80f. 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



The first thing that really made me conquer my fear of the city and visit the place on my lonesome was clothes. Music...well, Record World, when supplemented by the some of the used record joints on Long Island, covered most of the music I wanted to know about. Clothes, though, were a weirder proposition. When I started yearning for obsolete styles of suited slick, suburban casual, subcultural hip, there was just no place round my parts that could touch that satorial g-spot. My mom and I spent my nineteenth birthday driving around Long Island trying to find a decent a vintage clothing on Long Island, we said fuck it and spent the next day in scary New York City, buying stuff at Star Struck, Cheap Jacks, Unique Boutique, Antique Boutique, some of which I still have, some of which I still wear. This experience was so satisfying I stopped using my ma as the city-chauffeur and started going alone--sometimes to See/Hear for fanzines, or The Strand for books, or museums for kicks, but more usually the aforementioned vintage shops to capture a look I maybe saw in a magazine somewhere.

502-504 Broadway (John Kellum, 1960) used to house Canal Jeans. I went there a couple of times after I got a job in New York City in 1993, at which time vintage shops were starting ever-so-slowly to suck from growing prices and shrinking selection, then disappear POOF! in a cloud of musty gabardine. Still, the place was impressive: just when you thought you'd seen everything it had to offer, there'd be a new door or walkway with a more jeans, more shirts, more stuff. Naturally I never bought anything. Once they sold new jeans for $20! My God, I was so disbelieving I didn't even try them on. I figured there had to be something unseemly about them.

Some years later, touring SoHo with a copy of the AIA Guide to New York City in hand, I finally got a good look at the building. So grand it was. Like 85 Leonard, an almost exact contemporary, it was built in the "sperm-candle" style, though in marble rather than cast-iron (except for the ground floor), its columns soaring upwards into supple arches. It was late spring but the building felt like...it felt like Christmas. I don't know how else to put it. It was oddly festive, special. I don't even know why the association came about--Was it the façade's snowy whiteness? The Victorian-era architecture? The lure of shopping?--but it did, and it came strong.



It's now a Bloomingdale's. (Canal Jeans shuffled off to Brooklyn.) Here's a rare moment on the blog where I have to mention a potential conflict of interest: the place where I work for employs a number of the people behind the renovation while at a now-defunct design firm. They're good folks, some of the nicest people you'd ever meet, so I may be biased when I say I'm rather fond of the place. The department stores I knew from my Long Island mall days were near-windowless boxes so wide you could practically see the curvature of the earth; this location is half the size of the company's next-smallest stores, and filled with natural light coming through the windows on Broadway and Crosby Street, as well as two sets of roof windows--restoring it, perhaps unwittingly, to something like the fabulous retail showplace it must've been in the 1860s.

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.