This story is the final installment of a three-part series looking at the gentrification of the Upper West Side, Park Slope and SoHo more than two decades ago.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the alphabet soup of lower Manhattan neighborhoods now bandied about by brokers has its genesis in bureaucracy, courtesy of the New York City Planning Commission.
The era of NoChel (north Chelsea) to BoCoCa (the combination of Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens), began in the 1960s, when the planning commission birthed the mother of all New York neighborhood names – SoHo. The abbreviation actually shortens the official moniker of the South Houston Industrial District, not “south of Houston Street,” as is commonly believed, although that street represents the neighborhood’s northern boundary.
A “sadly dilapidated” neighborhood of 50 or so blocks, according to a 1970 story in the New York Times, the area would rapidly transform over the next five years. By 1975, its cachet was on the upswing, prompting headlines like “SoHo Grows Up And Grows Rich and Chic.” Fueled by baby boomers, the neighborhood got traction around the same time as the transformation of the Upper West Side and Park Slope, which today number among the city’s most desirable neighborhoods.
Between 500 and 1,000 artists had moved into the neighborhood over the past five years as of 1970, and the first galleries had opened in 1968. The area was a virtual outdoor museum of cast-iron commercial buildings from the 1860s, when the area was focused on the dry goods trade.
By the 1960s, the neighborhood was well past its commercial prime, housing small businessmen – “twine and paperjobbers, rag converters, window shade manufactures, and makers of corrugated boxes” – when artists started to arrive.
Some residents disliked the SoHo tag even then – “suggestive as it was of the grubby Bohemian district in London that the area here does not resemble,” the Times wrote. An earlier name for the area, Hell’s Hundred Acres, bestowed because of the many fires, was even less suitable.
A kind of last resort for artists, the area was one of the only spots left in Manhattan where artists could get the loft space they needed to create and house their work. The only problem was that they were living illegally in the neighborhood, which was zoned for commercial use, and conceivably faced eviction.
Rents were cheap – about a dollar per square foot, meaning $200 a month for a 2,500-square-foot loft. Some tenants complained, however, about having to pay what often amounted to a $2,000-or-more “fixture fee” to move into a loft – charges for installing residential features like a kitchen sink, refrigerator, toilet, shower stall and oven.
A 90-foot loft could be purchased for $4,500 in 1970. A building could sell for $150,000, though even that represented a dramatic climb over the $30,000 paid ten years earlier.
By 1971, the City Planning Commission rezoned SoHo to permit residence by artists, making it legal for the 600 or so families who were already there to remain.
The number of SoHo residents soon swelled through an influx of gallery owners, art dealers, publishers, local businessmen and even a “loft-living psychiatrist” who catered to SoHo patients
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Despite not “officially” being allowed to make their homes in SoHo, a more moneyed set was beginning to settle in. “Anyone who spends much time in SoHo will probably run into stockbrokers, lawyers and others who live there, simply because they want to,” the Times reported.
Raw space sold for $20,000 to $50,000 and “improved” space was selling for $28,000 to $100,000. Many artists were taking full-time jobs as teachers and commercial artists just to pay the bills, the Times said. By 1974, some were leaving. A Times article quoted Don Wyman, an artist who had recently left the neighborhood because his rent rose to $425 from $250.
The arts scene also grew far less casual. Instead of “anybody-drop-in” parties of the early 70s, by 1975 “far more characteristic, is [artist] Robert Rauschenberg, wearing suits made entirely of sewn-together neckties, giving a chic by-invitation-only party for Princess Christina of Sweden – with salmon flown in fresh from the fjords,” the Times reported.
In 1986, the city grandfathered everyone already in residence in SoHo, whether or not they were artists, but added rigid codes for new tenants and buyers. Still, those rules, which require an artist to live in a loft – rental, condo or co-op in certain zones, were difficult to enforce.
By 1993, when Aracely Brown first started working at the New York Open Center – a school offering programs in holistic learning and culture that’s been at 83 Spring Street for more than 20 years – SoHo was still “a small low key neighborhood,” she recalls.
“It was a lot like what I now see in Dumbo,” she said. In those days, space could still be rented for about $25 a square foot and there were lots of small art galleries and fabric stores in the neighborhood. “Across the street there used to be a Hasidic Jewish man who had a leather shop – it was like going to Williamsburg.”
By the end of 2004, the average price of an apartment in Soho/Tribeca had reached $1.56 million, up from $417,000 a decade earlier, according to the Douglas Elliman Manhattan Market Overview.