"'The story of SoHo is sort of the original story of adaptive reuse,' says Yukie Ohta, who was born and raised in the extraordinary New York neighborhood, which was ushered by artists from industrial to residential in the span of a few decades. Walking today among the painstakingly restored cast-iron buildings such as the 143-year-old “commercial palace” that is home to The Apartment by The Line, it is difficult to believe that SoHo was once viewed as an enormous slum ripe for demolition by the expressway that, thanks to locals and other urban activists, remained a gleam in Robert Moses’s eye. Ohta, who lives in SoHo today with her husband and young daughter, remembers her childhood neighborhood not as a glamorous haven for artists but as a small community of families, all doing their best to domesticate industrial lofts. These were places of makeshift kitchens and bathrooms, typically installed through a bartered exchange with a handy neighbor; wintertime rituals of stapling tarps to the windows as insulation; and blackout curtains to conceal illegal living situations from the eyes of passing authorities. ..."
The Line
Opened in 1920 by Neapolitan immigrants Nunzio and Jennie Dapolito, Vesuvio was a Prince Street institution. The beloved bakery closed in 2008 and reopened the following year as the Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery, preserving the lime-hued storefront of the original, which is pictured here in 1990.
2014 November: Is this the most wonderful sign in Soho?, 2013 September: SoHo, 2017 August: Two Prince Street relics on a pre-SoHo building
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