Directly south of Greenwich Village and west of Little Italy, SoHo is a relatively small neighborhood bounded roughly by Broadway, the Hudson River, and Houston and Canal Streets, which are major cross-town streets. The main street of SoHo is West Broadway, which to the north becomes Fifth Avenue on the other side of Washington Square Park. The primary SoHo properties are in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, which was created in 1973 and is bounded by West Broadway, Broadway and Crosby Street, and Houston and Canal Streets. Most of the buildings are fairly old, but very solid and with quiet elaborate architectural designs. Living spaces are among the largest in the city housing many artists, photographers and designers who often work where they live. Many of the tenants have opened small boutiques on the first floor of their residencies offering alternative clothing, house and office accessories and other strange but interesting gadgets

SoHo is also known for its nightlife. There is an array of after-hours bars and nightclubs in the area as well as some of the more fancy and elaborate restaurants, offering exquisite dinning from all over the globe. On weekends the neighborhood becomes a very lively marketplace where one can purchase art, designer clothes and other fashionable items that New York is famous for. Though prices are not cheap, locations not that central and large supermarkets not that frequent, many people like this neighborhood for its very quaint, relaxed and somewhat chic atmosphere. The cobblestone streets, traditional restaurants and European style coffee shops are what the local resident’s delight and they often spend their weekdays and weekends in this small but fulfilling part of town.

SoHo and TriBeCa are two of the most desirable residential communities in the city because of their interesting architecture, many loft apartments and many restaurants, art galleries and boutiques.

These former industrial areas had declined severely for most of the 20th Century until artists began to move into many small, older industrial buildings in SoHo (South of Houston Street) in the 1960’s in search of in expensive studios and housing. Fairly quickly, a substantial community of residents were living illegally, because of zoning laws, in the area and successfully pressured the city into changing the zoning to permit "artists" to continue to live in the converted premises.

By the early 1970’s, the presence of so many artists led to the area’s renaissance with the opening of many art galleries and then boutiques and restaurants to cater to the "art crowd". The large loft spaces were often dramatically restored and prettied up and real estate values soared to such an extent that the demand for space extended to other "undiscovered" areas nearby such as TriBeCa (the Triangle Below Canal) and then NoHo (the North of Houston Street area). What attracted first the artists and then their followers was the delightful cast-iron architecture of many of the area’s low-rise buildings. While Greenwich Village had for many decades had a reputation as a haven for artists, it did not have that many available lofts and it was expensive.

Directly south of Greenwich Village and west of Little Italy, SoHo is a relatively small neighborhood bounded roughly by Broadway, the Hudson River, and Houston and Canal Streets, which are major cross-town streets. The main street of SoHo is West Broadway, which to the north becomes Fifth Avenue on the other side of Washington Square Park. The primary SoHo properties are in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, which was created in 1973 and is bounded by West Broadway, Broadway and Crosby Street, and Houston and Canal Streets. West Broadway is the district’s "main street" with the most famous art galleries, boutiques and restaurants, but the other streets in the district, Prince, Spring, Broome and Grand and Wooster, Greene and Mercer are all very interesting, both architecturally and urbanistically.

Many of the buildings were erected between the 1850’s and 1880’s. Cast iron parts for the facades were mass-produced locally and this district contains the world’s largest collection of such facades, many in the Italianate or French Second Empire styles. The district has several non-cast-iron buildings of distinction as well. Richard Morris Hunt designed the rather delicate 1874 Roosevelt building at 478-483 Broadway, Vaux & Withers designed 448 Broome Street, Renwick & Sands designed 34 Howard Street. Some of the more important structures are the Haughwout Store building at 488 Broadway, erected in 1857 and designed by John P. Gaynor and restored in 1995, 484 Broome Street, an impressive and massive Romanesque-Revival, non-cast-iron structure designed by Alfred Zucker.

"A proud and handsome, but not egocentric, building here proves that quality does not demand originality for its own sake. Built for Eder V. Haughwout, a merchant in china, cut glass silverware and chandeliers, it also housed the first practical safety elevator, installed by Elisha Graves Otis, founder of that ubiquitous elevator company. The Corinthian columns that flank the arches are sometimes remembered as Serlian, after the drawings and writings of Sebastian Serlio (1475-1554), later lifted by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) and most elegantly displayed at the Basilica in Vicenza", observed Elliot Willensky and Norval White in their great book, "The A.I.A. Guide to New York City, Third Edition", (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). The early cast-iron buildings were cheaper to erect than stone buildings but by the end of the 19th Century developers were beginning to favor steel-framed brick and terracotta loft buildings, many of which were designed to accommodate garment factories, including the superb, "L"-shaped, Little Singer Building at 561 Broadway, designed by Ernest Flagg and completed in 1904 with its curved steel braces, recessed windows and fine detailing. Broadway between Canal Street and Tenth Street, where it turns to the northwest, is a fabulous stretch of mid-rise commercial properties that is remarkably vibrant with street life and extremely rich in architectural glories with only a few gaps. A couple of landmarks are missing, however. The large Broadway Central Hotel collapsed and was replaced and Bannerman’s, a great military surplus emporium that had suits of armor and a tree stump from Gettysburg embedded with more than 20 cannonballs from the Civil War and an owner who built himself a castle in the middle of the Hudson River a few miles up from the city, has gone.

The many fine conversions and restorations in this district is one of the preservation movement’s great success stories, not only in New York, but the nation, and many credit Margot Gayle, an architectural historian, with much of that success in waging the campaign for landmark status. The area’s success is not confined to the boundaries of the official SoHo district and Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency, relocated from midtown in the 1980’s to a new, large office building nearby on Hudson Street in large part because of the boundless creative energies of SoHo. Indeed, in the late 1990’s a new hotel was built at the southern end of the district even as many art galleries were beginning to relocate from SoHo to less expensive spaces in the Chelsea district to the north and west.

The tremendous popularity of the area took the city by surprise as foreigners flocked to the art galleries and soon chic restaurants and boutiques sprang up to capture their trade and traffic and soon people looked up at the buildings and found them lovely, many with arched windows and high ceilings and that most precious commodity in the city, space. The phenomenon of SoHo would result in the rediscovery and renaissance of several other districts that had fallen into neglect, or at least out of popularity, such as the Union Square and Flatiron Districts and the immense and undeniable desirability of these areas and their excellent architectural legacies was a strong factor in the willingness of many major residential developers in the city to move away from their typical "white-brick monstrosities" that categorized so much of post-war building and to pay at least some attention to "design." Close to SoHo is the small but charming group of fine Federal-style townhouses in the Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District to the west of the Avenue of the Americas. To the west of this district are many large industrial buildings.

NoHo (North of Houston) is a small area north and east of SoHo that is centered around Lafayette Street and contains many fine landmarks: the Puck Building at 295-309 Lafayette Street, designed by Albert Wagner, a red-brick, Romanesque Revival commercial building graced by two large statues on its facades of Puck, the Shakespearian lad of mischief that was the mascot of a prominent humor magazine around the turn of the century; the New York Public Theater building (originally the Astor Library) at 425 Lafayette Street, designed by Alexander Saeltzer, Griffith Thomas and Thomas Stent and restored and converted to theater uses for theater impresario Joseph Papp by Giorgio Cavaglieri in 1976; the 1833 Colonnade Row, which is also known as La Grange Terrace, at 428-436 Lafayette Street, attributed to Seth Geer; and the DeVinne Press Building at 399 Lafayette Street, designed by Babb, Cook & Willard.