SoHo
Walk down Mercer Street on a weekday morning and the cobblestones — Belgian blocks, technically — give the whole block a low, resonant clatter under your feet. Above you, the facades are cast iron painted to look like stone, column after column of them, running unbroken for blocks. SoHo holds the largest concentration of cast-iron architecture on earth, and once you start reading the buildings, you can't stop.
This is a neighborhood that has been remade several times over: Federal rowhouses, then grand commercial lofts, then a de facto artists' colony, then galleries, then retail. Each layer left something behind. The bones are still the bones from the 1850s.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who keep coming back tend to arrive before the shops open, when the light hits the iron facades at a low angle and the streets are quiet enough to actually look up. The E.V. Haughwout Building at Broadway and Broome is worth a long stop — the repetition of arches is almost hypnotic. Kenn's Broome Street Bar, in a building from 1825, is a reliable anchor for a late afternoon.
Deals in SoHo
Book directly at the providerHow SoHo came to be
Chester Rapkin, an urban planner, coined the name SoHo in 1962 — shorthand for South of Houston — in a study that counted roughly 650 manufacturing and warehouse firms still operating in the area. By then the neighborhood had already cycled through several lives: wealthy Federal-era residences in the 1820s and '30s, a mid-century commercial district where Tiffany & Co. and Lord & Taylor both got their starts, and a stretch of Broadway lined with theaters and hotels. The cast-iron facades that define it today went up mostly between 1840 and 1880, designed by architects including John B. Snook, Griffith Thomas, and Isaiah Rogers.
By the 1960s, artists were moving into the empty lofts illegally, paying as little as $50 a month. Chuck Close and Nam June Paik were among the early residents. The Artist Tenants Association, formed in 1961, pushed for legalization, which came in stages through the 1970s and '80s. A parallel fight, led by Jane Jacobs and others including Julie Finch, defeated a proposed expressway that would have demolished most of the neighborhood. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the SoHo–Cast Iron Historic District in 1973; it was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1978.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring and early autumn are the most comfortable times to walk the neighborhood at length — temperatures in the 50s to low 70s Fahrenheit, with enough light to read the facades properly. Summer gets humid and the Broadway corridor fills up; winter is cold but the streets thin out and the ironwork looks particularly sharp against a grey sky.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.