Soho was the original downtown industrial neighborhood left for dead that became an artists-in-residence enclave. In 1970, Peter Hellman wrote about an area on the cusp
, a newsletter miniseries that resurfaces classic stories of ever-rising rents, the next hot neighborhood, and some truly nightmarish living situations from theBetween the high-priced real estate of Greenwich Village and the office towers of lower Manhattan are forty blocks of rickety lofts called Soho, stretching south from Houston to Canal Street and east from West Broadway to Lafayette.
The only catch is that the resident artists of 451–453 West Broadway do not have a legal right in the world to live in their property. Soho is zoned M5, which allows light manufacturing and commercial use, but not residential use. These ten artists are not the only ones who have the problem, of course. Soho’s 40 blocks are now the illegal homes of about 500 artists, sculptors, designers, dancers, and cinematographers. With their families they number close to 2,000.
The Planning Commission agrees with the artists that they can no longer afford to hang in a state of legal nonexistence, but ever since a commissioner named Chester Rapkin did a study in 1962 in which he found that a twelve-block section of Soho was supplying jobs for 15,000 unskilled workers, most of whom were from minority groups, the Commission has been on record in favor of preserving those enterprises which have come to be called “incubator ” industries.
On the key issue of whether they might be outbidding the incubator businessmen for lofts, the artists are dubious. They argue that the standard 25-by-100-foot floor-through is too small even for most mini-businesses in Soho. They came to the area precisely because these small lofts were going begging. The Commission’s own recent survey bears them out.
Last May the Soho Artists Association made a grab for publicity with the Soho Artists Festival. For a full weekend, lofts in dozens of buildings were opened to the public under the joint sponsorship of the Association and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. The normal Sabbath quiet of Soho was overwhelmed, the streets were full of gaping uptowners and suburbanites, most of them puffing from unaccustomed treks up and down steep old staircases.
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