Soho Historic District

SoHo is a compact district of about twenty-eight blocks in lower Manhattan, bounded roughly by Houston Street, Crosby Street, Canal Street and West Broadway. Its warehouses and commercial buildings, mostly five or six stories, were built largely between 1860 and 1890 and form the largest concentration of cast-iron architecture in the world. Cast iron was used mainly for facades, which imitated stone in Renaissance Revival, Second Empire and neo-Grec styles. Notable works include buildings by Griffith Thomas, J.F. Duckworth, Richard Morris Hunt and Ernest Flagg, whose Little Singer Building marks the shift toward steel-frame skyscrapers. The buildings reflect the commercial prosperity of New York as textile and mercantile firms moved north. The area was earlier farmland, including land granted to freed slaves in the Dutch period, and is noted as the site of the first free Black settlement on Manhattan. Intrusions such as garages, service stations and parking lots are few.