SOHO

Called SoHo because it lies south of Houston Street in lower Manhattan, it became, especially in the 1970s, a center for avant-garde activities in American visual art, Performance Art, music, Mixed-Means Theater, Conceptual Art, and literature, much as Montmartre was to Parisian art nearly a century before. Though previously an industrial slum with empty lofts, SoHo—bounded by West Broadway to the west, Broadway to the east, and Canal Street to the south—in the late 1960s...