The Loft Lifestyle

As recorded in Sharon Zukin's now classic Loft Living, the idea that raw building space designed for manufacturing and storage could become a sign of upscale trendy living got its start in an area of lower Manhattan that, by the 1960s, many viewed as an industrial wasteland.

Proponents of Manhattan redevelopment hoped to replace manufacturing that remained on the island with what they considered to be more valuable real estate devoted to business services. Few people saw the value of preserving some 500 cast iron buildings designed for production that was increasingly moving to the urban periphery.

The low rent of these buildings along with their undivided space, high ceilings and large windows made them quite attractive to artists for studios. Although artists had been living in these lofts since the 1930s, it was in the 1960s their presence became prominent. Due to concerns over fire hazards, many artists faced eviction and in response organized to win the legal right to reside in SoHo lofts.

Artist's appreciation for buildings previously considered arcane structures for a declining manufacturing sector helped led to widespread support for their preservation and helped create the loft aesthetic. The New York Times, architecture magazines and other media began to celebrate this aesthetic and soon wealthy professionals replaced working artists as the primary consumers of loft space.

Consequently, although SoHo still carries the cache of an artist's unorthodox lifestyle, in reality few artists can now afford rents for a studio apartment that average above 2000 a month.

Noho's Etymology

Noho as a term for a section within North Hollywood can be traced to the 1980s, but its use as term for a neighborhood district can be traced at least to the early 1970s when people began applying it to a neighborhood of warehouses and factory buildings north of Houston Street in New York City. This label emerged after the parallel district south of Houston received the label SoHo in the 1960s.

New York's SoHo is probably the most famous, but it was not the first. A district in London named Soho dates to the 17th century. By the 19th century, London's Soho had become a neighborhood for immigrants, including Karl Marx in the 1850s, as well as home to a seamy nightlife of music halls and prostitution. In the twentieth century, the unconventional atmosphere of the district attracted artists and poets to its pubs and music scene, and in the 1950s coffee shops became the center of Beatnik culture. Soho also became the launch point for British Rock and Roll, with The Rolling Stones performing for the first time at the Marquee Club in 1962.

When the name from a neighborhood in one city is applied to the neighborhood in another city, some of the accumulated associations of the original neighborhood are extended to the new neighborhood.
These associations may ultimately have little connection to the complex history of the original neighborhood.

In the case of the NoHo arts district, local business leaders explicitly intended to borrow from the image of SoHo in New York, where a formerly industrial area became an arts district and then a trendy upscale shopping area.

For this reason it is valuable to provide a brief overview of how SoHo's transformation took place.