Word: soho
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...America has an art capital, it may well be an unlikely-looking area of Manhattan called SoHo, a place of grimy warehouses and zigzagging fire escapes, delivery trucks and wholesale machine shops. Its dark and sullen buildings are filled with lofts that house the heaviest concentration of art activity in the country...
...SoHo is an abbreviation of the city planning commission's original title for the place-"South Houston Industrial District." Its exact boundaries are uncertain, but it can be said to be bordered on the north and south by Houston and Canal streets, and by the Bowery and West Broadway to the east and west. In these 50-odd blocks, a large proportion of New York artists, some 700 of them, with their families, now live and work...
...early 19th century, SoHo was New York's brothel area. After the Civil War, most of the district was razed. Warehouses were built. By happy circumstance, it was just when New York architects were discovering the possibilities of cast iron in a facade. Today the buildings are cavernous and filthy, half-empty, with successive impastos of paint flaking from their arched windows and delicate, rusting Corinthian capitals. But SoHo is a kind of museum of the style, containing some of the best buildings that were made within that idiom anywhere in the 19th century-strong-boned, forthright in detail...
Until 1960, when a few artists began to move into its lofts, SoHo was entirely given to light industry -twine manufacturers, nut-and-bolt shops, metal platers, rag wholesalers, lumberyards and dealers in new and used cardboard boxes. The floor rent was low; ten years ago, 3,500 sq. ft. cost $75 a month. But because SoHo was strictly zoned for light industry, nobody could legally live there...
...artists managed to, at first by subterfuge. A sculptor might rent a loft for $100 or less a month, clean it out and install a folding bed that could disappear against the wall if a building inspector called. He had no security of tenure. The typical habit of SoHo slumlords, which persists today, was to offer no lease, wait for the artist to spend a few thousand dollars renovating the loft, and then arbitrarily double the rent. The pattern of exploitation worked because artists had nowhere else to go. There was no space uptown. Greenwich Village was already turning into...