Quick answer
SoHo, short for South of Houston Street, is a neighborhood of Lower Manhattan famous for its cast-iron buildings. It became a center of artist lofts and galleries starting in the 1970s, and much of it is protected as the SoHo–Cast Iron Historic District.
Full transcript
South of Houston
SoHo is short for South of Houston Street, a name coined for the blocks below that boulevard and above Canal. The building stock is older than the nickname: rows of nineteenth-century warehouses, many of them fronted with cast-iron facades — columns, pediments, and ornamental bays cast cheaply from molten iron and painted to look like carved stone. In 1973 the city protected the whole thing as the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, 73 acres of it, and in 1978 the National Register of Historic Places followed. Look up as you walk the cobbled side streets; the iron streetscape here is one of the great surviving examples of its era anywhere.
The artists' factory town
The neighborhood sealed its fame in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when artists slipped into the abandoned manufacturing lofts, dropped canvas and paint onto vast skylit floors, and opened white-walled ground-floor galleries. What happened there became the template of the modern artist district — and then of gentrification itself, as galleries gave way to flagship stores and the rents climbed. The same cast-iron shells that held painters now hold boutiques, yet the white cube persists. Roughly 18,894 people call SoHo home by one census count, fewer than you would guess from the crowds, and most of its reinvention is measured in storefronts rather than apartments.
What to do on the blocks
Go on a weekday morning, when the sidewalks clear and the private galleries open their doors across the 73 acres of the district. Start at Broadway and Prince where the crowds gather, then peel onto Greene, Wooster, or Broome and crane your neck at the cast-iron bays overhead — read the foundry names stamped into the lintels if you can. Let the shops have the avenue and the quiet streets keep the art. Find a corner with an iron column at the ground floor and count the columns holding up the building above; each one was poured to imitate carved stone a century before anyone called the place SoHo. Look up last thing, because the storefronts change with the economy and the facades are the permanent part.