Word: soho
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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...
...organizer is black (the museum has never had a white curator) and all demands from artists for a white guest curator to give advice in this delicate area are rebuffed. So the museum's man spends a nervous year among the studios of East Hampton, Venice West and SoHo in an atmosphere of mounting agitation and distrust. By the eve of the show, a number of his chosen artists have angrily pulled out, and they include many of the best white talents. The exhibition is crippled. "That's honkies for you," sighs the perplexed director to the battered...
...Covent Garden, Bizet's Carmen was performed in total darkness. In Soho, a resourceful strip-club owner issued flashlights to his patrons so that the show could go on. A TV mystery went off the air just as the detective was saying "The person we want for murder is . . ." Parliament debated, and the Queen took afternoon tea, by candlelight. Millions of homes were without heat, electricity or hot water for long periods, and whole areas of London resembled the capital during the wartime blitz. Darkness and gloom had descended on Britain because 125,000 Electrical Trades Union (E.T.U.) workers...