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SoHo

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LOCATION

Lower Manhattan. SoHo lies south of Houston Street (hence the name) and is bound by Broadway to the east and by Canal Street to the south. The only logical western boundary is the Hudson River, although many would tell you that "West SoHo" - the part of the neighborhood located west of Sixth Avenue (aka Avenue of the Americas) - is competely different in character. These purists are partially right - it is different - more industrialized and less crowded - but to us it's still SoHo.

APARTMENTS & REAL ESTATE

There are very few rental buildings in the area (i.e. buildings where mere mortals can rent an apartment), but they do exist - mostly on the western side of SoHo, along Sixth Avenue. Let's be clear - these apartments are not lofts, they are regular apartments, but at least they exist and allow a few hundred lucky less-than millionaires to live in the neighborhood, too.

Selected Rental Buildings:

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Selected No-Fee Rental Listings:

See all SoHo No Fee Rental Apartments (1 total) rss

Condo Buildings:

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Co-op Buildings:

See some of the area's SoHo Co-op Apartment Buildings

POPULATION AND DEMOGRAPHICS

It is very difficult to put together a composite sketch of the typical SoHo dweller, but I'll try. First, over 90% of people you see in SoHo don't live there. They shop, they work or they go out, but live - no.

If we were to look at the crowd from a historical perspective, people inhabiting SoHo in the 60's, 70's and 80's were artists attracted by large and vacant industrial spaces (good for hanging your paintings, you know). They squatted in empty buildings and since in the 60's pretty much all buildings here were empty, they gradually filled the neighborhood. A 1962 report on underutilized commercial zones in the city described SoHo as an enormous commercial slum. That was the starting point for gentrification. In the next 5-6 years plans for demolishing most of the neighborhood and building a highway here were actively discussed. Luckily, that never happened. 1970's saw a peak of artistic activity in the area. In the end, many artists were granted the right to stay by negotiating a deal with the city and the landlords whereby they bought out their illegally occupied spaces for what very soon seemed a ridiculously low price.

Subsequent transformations of SoHo is a classic tale of a gentrified neighborhood: the very same people who made it liveable and "cool" were forced out by the rising prices - unless these people were lucky to already own their lofts.

Today, much of the area is populated with Wall Streeters whose only distinguishing characteristic is that while they could have settled in million-dollar apartments, they chose million-dollar lofts instead. They are nice people and all but there's hardly anything "artistic" about them (again, apart from the taste for loft living).

Among "artistic" people, two categories have survived - those who made it big (famous actors, painters, musicians such as Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Lenny Kravitz and dozens of others) and those who squatted in the 1960's, negotiated a sweet deal and now own their lofts. In other words, almost no one under 35.

LATEST HEADLINES, NEWS & REVIEWS

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Neighborhood Photos:

Houston Street
Houston Street

SoHo. Wooster Street.
SoHo. Wooster Street.

West SoHo. Greenwich Street.
West SoHo. Greenwich Street.

SoHo. Corner of West Broadway and Prince Street
SoHo. Corner of West Broadway and Prince Street

SoHo. Broome & Greene Streets.
SoHo. Broome & Greene Streets.

See all SoHo photos

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