A Brief Look Into SoHo's Past
From The Peopling of NYC
[edit] SoHo Through The Years
Today, SoHo is a successful and growing neighborhood. It started off as a swamp carelessly colonized by the Dutch and grew to be one of the most prosperous areas in New York City. SoHo is roughly bordered by Houston Street on the North, Lafayette Street on the East, Canal Street on the south, and Varick Street on the west.
A Brief Look into SOHO’s Past
1600s: Meadows, forests, swamps, and grassy hills make up most of the area.
Six different Indian tribes live in villages: Warpoes, Nahtouk, Ispetenga, Muscoota, Sherakopak, and Sappokanican Indians. The street now known as Broadway was just a trail that connected these Indian Villages. The trail was called the Weckquaesgeck Trail.
According to the Manatus Map (the earliest map of Manhattan) the Dutch built their first settlement and settled in it in the very south of Manhattan by 1639. They grew plantations, built roads, and erected homes.
In 1660, a Dutch settler named Augustus Herrmann bought a huge amount of land from the Indian tribes in the southern tip of Manhattan. Much of what he bought then is the land we call SoHo now. His brother-in-law, Nicholas Bayard, inherited the land after Herrmann died. He continued to fabricate the foundations of the neighborhood.
By 1728, farms had sprung up all over SoHo. While some land was already being used to grow crops, the rest of it was still swampland or forestry. Broome Street, between Thompson and Greene Streets, was covered with trees. Beakman's Swamp, located on today’s Spring, Broome, and Grand Streets, was still uninhabited. Bayard's Mount, the highest point in Manhattan, situated west of Broome Street. Collect Pond, an important source of fresh water until pollution made it deadly in the 18th century, and Lispenard's Meadow, a swamp West of Broadway, made up the rest of the area.
Large farms were eventually divided up into smaller ones. However, the many natural boundaries inhibited the settlement of SoHo until 1775, when the Dutch extended Broadway all the way to where it meets present-day Canal Street.
In the late 18th century and early 19th century, urbanization began to take place. Immigrants flocked in and the natural landmasses had to go. Collect Pond, which was 48 acres large and up to 50 feet deep, got so contaminated by the run-off from the many small industries, tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, and factories that the city eventually drained it.
In 1838, Tombs Prison, the central prison in New York City, was built over the once beautiful Collect Pond. Lispenard’s meadow and Beakman’s Swamp were leveled off to Bayard’s Mount.
In the early 1800s, SoHo became home to the wealthy and middle class. Rapid development attracted many business enterprises. Hotels and theaters, elegant stores, stately mansions, minstrel halls, gambling casinos, brothels, and whorehouses bounced up down Broadway. This caused people to start building streets. Buildings were built out of stone and fires were rampant throughout the newly emerging city.
After the Civil War, industry sprung up. By the 1880s, huge textile industries had settled in SoHo. The population shifted uptown, where industry and commerce followed. Small businesses, trading companies, factories, clothing outlets, and textile companies emerged.
The 1800s, especially the period between 1840 and 1880, brought with it the building of what is known today as SoHo's Cast Iron District. In 1899, a building code was passed ordering the backing of cast iron fronts with masonry. Most of the buildings which stand today are built in this way. It was the arrival of steel as a major construction material that brought a quick end to the cast iron period.
In October of 1962 New York City wrote that SoHo was a commercial slum. This classification gave Highway Commissioner Robert Moses as excuse to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway through SoHo. This idea would, not only drive out many of the artists and business men that have been quietly moving in over the past couple of years, but would also destroy most of the historical cast-iron architecture. Moses argued that the highway would ease the flow of traffic by connecting the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges with the Westside Highway and the Holland Tunnel. He said that the area’s low property values and vacant buildings made the area useless. Fortunately, strong opposition to the highway materialized, led by urbanologist Jane Jacobs. With her and her team’s persistent resistance the Board of Estimates rejected the proposal in 1968.
1973: Soho’s Cast Iron District was designated a historic district by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.