“Hip’s Home on the Fringe,” stated The New York Times headline, reporting a movement of fashion boutiques to the area around Grand Street, in the southern reaches of SoHo.
I’m not quite sure what that says about our current economy. At a time when storefronts are boarding up on Main Streets and in malls around the country, what explains a vibrant expansion going on in what they’re calling South SoHo? (Since SoHo means “South of Houston,” what is this new area? SoSoHo? And wouldn’t rappers have a field day with that??)
I’m on slightly surer ground about what this says about New York – restless, expanding, constantly pushing the frontiers of where to go and what to do. When I watch a show like “How to Make it in America” on HBO and see all the hipness associated with places like the Lower East Side and parts of Brooklyn, I think how amazing it is to remember a time when nobody went to Canal Street except, perhaps, to buy a knockoff handbag on the way to the Holland Tunnel or the Manhattan Bridge.
The Bowery was vagrant, where you’d better be careful not to wander if you went to Chinatown or Little Italy on a Saturday night for dinner. The Lower East Side? Sundays for fabrics on Broome Street and maybe dinner at Ratner’s on Delancey Street, but then home before it got dark!
A couple of years ago, when VMSD was putting its annual December-in-New York issue together, our New York editor and irrepressible NYC cheerleader, Eric Feigenbaum, tried to sell us on reporting on Brooklyn. He and I both have Brooklyn in our backgrounds, but mine was many years ago, during a “you live where???” time in New York’s socio-cultural history. Now they make references to “Hipster Brooklyn.”
The SoSoHo stores are mostly independent boutiques, much like SoHo was in the 1980s. But as they attract weekend strollers from uptown with AmEx cards, I wonder how long before the national chains begin paying attention? (And, of course, as the national chains plant their flags, the hipster crowd will already be looking elsewhere. The East Bronx? Astoria? Staten Island?)
I wonder, too, if this is a zero-sum game. Does the success of Grand Street and Crosby Street and Howard Street begin to diminish the vitality of Spring and Prince and Bleecker? I know, this is New York. But I also know we have a steady 9 percent unemployment rate that just isn’t going away. Something always has to give.