SoHo Art Guide
Before the boutiques and the $30 smoothie bars, SoHo was a wasteland — an industrial no man’s land of cast-iron factories and loft buildings that nobody wanted. That’s exactly what made it perfect. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists moved into the illegal lofts, turned the freight elevators into art studios, and built the most consequential art neighborhood in American history. This is what’s left.
1. 112 Greene Street — Where It Started
112 Greene Street
This is ground zero. In 1970, artist Jeffrey Lew opened 112 Workshop here in an old rag salvaging factory, and it was the first truly artist-run space in SoHo — maybe in New York. The model was radical in its simplicity: any artist who could set up and dismantle their own exhibition was welcome. No curators, no dealers, no gatekeepers.
The space was a pile, in the best sense. Unfinished floors, crumbling walls, holes in the floor, rust everywhere. Artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Willoughby Sharp, Laurie Anderson, Chuck Close, Joseph Beuys, and Richard Serra either started here or passed through regularly. Holland Cotter described it this way: “People came, working with scrap metal, cast-off wood and cloth, industrial paint, rope, string, dirt, lights, mirrors, video. New genres — installation, performance — were invented. Most of the work was made on site and ephemeral: there one day, gone the next.”
Matta-Clark grew a cherry tree in the dim basement using artificial lights. Richard Serra collaborated on video work before he became synonymous with Cor-ten steel. The decrepit building wasn’t a backdrop — it was the medium.
Lew eventually sold the basement recording studio, which became Greene Street Recording — an early headquarters for hip hop. RUN-DMC, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Ice Cube, and Sonic Youth all recorded there. The building is now retail, as is everything in SoHo. But for a decade, this address housed more important work per square foot than almost anywhere in the city.
2. Donald Judd’s Building
101 Spring Street
Donald Judd bought this five-story cast-iron building in 1968, before the neighborhood had a name, before any gallery had set up shop, when it was still appropriately called the Cast Iron District. The building was constructed in 1870 by Nicholas Whyte as retail and office space, then spent decades as a sewing factory. Judd saw what artists were beginning to see all over SoHo: a neighborhood full of extraordinary, cheap, large-footprint spaces that the city had essentially abandoned.
Judd lived and worked here for the rest of his life, splitting time between this building and his compound in Marfa, Texas. The philosophy was the same in both places: the location of an installation isn’t incidental, it’s inseparable from the work’s meaning. He arranged art, furniture, and decor as a single cohesive experience — less Frank Lloyd Wright and more total environment. He never wanted a white-cube gallery with interchangeable objects on temporary loan.
When Judd died in 1994, the building’s contents were left exactly as he had placed them. After a $23 million restoration, the Judd Foundation reopened the building to the public in 2013. Tours are by appointment only and worth the effort. The abundance of natural light flooding in from Spring Street is still doing exactly what Judd intended.
3. 420 West Broadway — The Gallery Building
420 West Broadway
By the mid-1970s, the galleries had arrived. And no building was more central to SoHo’s gallery era than 420 West Broadway, which housed Leo Castelli, Sonnabend Gallery, and other heavy-hitting dealers stacked on top of each other in one cast-iron building. It was the undisputed epicenter.
Castelli, who had already been operating on the Upper East Side since 1957, moved to SoHo along with the tide of the art world. His gallery represented Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein — artists who had defined postwar American art. Moving downtown wasn’t a concession; it was recognition that the action had shifted.
Sonnabend Gallery had its own moment of notoriety here. In 1972, Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” turned the gallery floor itself into the medium. Acconci positioned himself under a ramped plywood floor and, for the duration of the exhibition, narrated his sexual fantasies into a microphone broadcast to visitors walking above him. It was either the most brazen or most boring performance piece in the history of conceptual art, depending on your tolerance for provocation as content. Either way, you couldn’t ignore it.
The building is now luxury condominiums. The galleries are gone to Chelsea, to the online auction market, to wherever galleries go when the rent triples.
4. FOOD Cafe Site — Prince and Wooster
Prince Street at Wooster Street
In 1971, there was nowhere to eat in SoHo. That problem became an artwork. Gordon Matta-Clark, his then-girlfriend Caroline Goodden, and artist Tina Girouard opened FOOD, an artist-run restaurant at Prince and Wooster, and it changed both the neighborhood and the art world in ways neither a gallery nor a studio could.
The menu was seasonal, local, and internationally influenced — ceviche, sashimi, borscht — concepts that wouldn’t become restaurant trends for another three decades. The kitchen was fully open. Artisan bakers came down from Vermont. Matta-Clark cooked occasionally, but the regular guest chefs were also modern dancers, Donald Judd, Robert Kushner, and whoever else was around.
One of Matta-Clark’s famous dinners, the “Bone Dinner,” ended with the kitchen collecting all the oxtail soup bones, scrubbing and stringing them together into necklaces that guests wore home.
FOOD was also an informal arts philanthropist, employing struggling artists as waiters and cooks and providing low-cost food for the community that was building something new downtown. It lasted three years before it became too popular and fashionable — at which point it had already done its work. The corner is a restaurant now too, which is either appropriate or depressing.
5. The Wall — Forrest Myers
559 Broadway at Houston Street
Before anything else greets you at the northern edge of SoHo, look up. Those steel blue bars jutting out from the building at Broadway and Houston are “The Wall” by Forrest Myers, commissioned in 1973 and known for years as the Gateway to SoHo.
The building’s owner commissioned it to cover architectural scars, but the 42 steel rods — painted a distinctive slate blue — became something more: a permanent announcement that you were entering a different kind of neighborhood. For anyone arriving from Midtown or the Village in the 1970s, The Wall was a marker. SoHo begins here.
The piece has a complicated legal history. In 1997, the building’s owners tried to remove it to make way for a billboard that could generate an estimated $600,000 a year in advertising revenue. Myers filed a federal lawsuit; he lost in 2005. The piece was taken down during construction in 2002 and remained in storage for years even after the work was finished. After sustained community pressure, a compromise was reached in 2007: The Wall was moved up 18 feet, allowing advertising space near the ground level, and reinstalled using newly fabricated rods made under Myers’ supervision. He was 65. He said if a film was made about the fight, he hoped Brad Pitt would play him.
6. The Earth Room — Walter De Maria
141 Wooster Street
On the second floor of a loft building on Wooster Street, there is a room full of dirt. Not as metaphor. Not as installation commentary. Literally: 250 cubic yards of earth, covering 3,600 square feet to a depth of 22 inches. It weighs 280,000 pounds. It smells like a forest. It has been there, in this same room, since 1977.
Walter De Maria’s “New York Earth Room” is one of three earth rooms he created; the other two no longer exist. This one has been maintained by the Dia Art Foundation since 1980. You view it from a single vantage point through a glass barrier. You cannot walk in it. There is someone working at the desk who is, probably, extremely bored.
The dirt is the same dirt from 1977. It gets cleaned in the summer (the room closes seasonally for maintenance). The person who tends it periodically removes mushrooms and plants that attempt to grow there, unless they’re left long enough to complete a full life cycle.
What makes the Earth Room quietly extraordinary isn’t the visual impact — though the smell alone is worth the trip — it’s the fact of its existence. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and it has been occupied by an unironic room full of dirt for nearly five decades. Dia’s commitment to maintaining De Maria’s permanent New York works is a genuine cultural achievement.
7. The Broken Kilometer — Walter De Maria
393 West Broadway
Two blocks south, in a ground-floor space wedged between designer shops on West Broadway, De Maria pulled off the same trick again. The Broken Kilometer consists of 500 brass rods, each two meters long and two inches in diameter, laid end to end in five rows across a large open room with Corinthian columns. If arranged in a single line, they would form exactly one kilometer.
The rods are spaced with increasing distance between them — each gap 5mm wider than the last — so that from the front of the room they all appear equidistant. The effect is optical, mathematical, and completely absorbing. The gleaming brass fills the room with a warm light.
The piece has been on continuous view since 1979. Like the Earth Room, it’s free and maintained by the Dia Foundation. Together they form a kind of double argument: that this neighborhood, which once consisted of raw industrial spaces exactly like these, could and should preserve something of what it was — not a museum diorama, but an actual live artwork in an actual live space. Stop by both on the same day. Walk between them.
8. 110 Greene Street — Tony Goldman’s Building
110 Greene Street
Tony Goldman was one of the first real estate investors to bet on SoHo in the early 1970s, and unlike most of the developers who followed, he made a genuine effort to give something back to the art community that had built the neighborhood’s value. His building at 110 Greene Street became a kind of unofficial arts complex, filled with work from his personal collection: Swoon, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Logan Hicks, Retna, and others throughout the floors.
Out front, embedded in the sidewalk, is the work that makes the building remarkable: Francoise Schein’s “Subway Map Floating on a NY Sidewalk,” installed in 1985. Over ninety feet long and twelve feet wide, the entire block was dug up to install it. Schein embedded the full New York City subway map in brass lines and LED lights into the sidewalk, with the lights connected to adjacent buildings’ basements where they glow at night. The piece is supposed to represent the relationship between human rights and underground transportation networks — a reading that works better as an idea than as immediate legible content — but as a physical object in the street it’s remarkable, especially considered in the context of 1985, when the neighborhood was still rough and the subway map meant something different than it does now.
Goldman went on to collaborate with gallerist Jeffrey Deitch to launch the Houston-Bowery mural wall, and later helped create Wynwood Walls in Miami. He died in 2012; his daughter Jessica Goldman Srebnick continues managing the wall program.
9. Houston-Bowery Mural Wall
Houston Street at Bowery
In 1982, Keith Haring painted a 30-foot mural on the concrete wall at Houston and Bowery — a sprawling blank slab that links SoHo to the Lower East Side. Haring chose the spot deliberately, positioning himself at the junction between two worlds.
From 1984 until 2008, the wall was used for advertising. Then Goldman and Jeffrey Deitch reclaimed it as a rotating mural program, commissioning Os Gemeos, Kenny Scharf, Shepard Fairey, and dozens of others to create large-scale temporary works. It became the most visible platform in New York for street art at a moment when street art was transitioning from vandalism to institution.
That transition is worth sitting with. The wall that Haring painted illegally in 1982 became a curated program managed by a real estate developer. The neighborhood that artists colonized as a refuge from the market became the most expensive zip code in Manhattan. The murals still go up, and they’re still often good. But the Houston-Bowery wall is also a monument to how thoroughly the art world absorbed the avant-garde and made it sellable.
10. A.I.R. Gallery Site — 79 Wooster Street
79 Wooster Street
In 1972, artists Barbara Zucker and Susan Williams were done waiting for the male-dominated SoHo gallery scene to notice them. They founded A.I.R. Gallery — Artists in Residence — at 79 Wooster Street as an all-women cooperative. The name referenced Jane Eyre, the condition of a certain kind of isolation, and the unromantic reality of what female artists were facing.
A.I.R. was formed specifically in response to a 1970 protest at the Whitney Museum, which at the time had only 5% of its collection devoted to work by female artists. The structure was explicitly anti-dealer: members paid dues, voted on programming, and curated their own shows. Control stayed with the artists.
The gallery operated here until eventually relocating to DUMBO, where it continues today. The original Wooster Street space is long gone into retail, but the founding of A.I.R. at this address is part of the contested history of who actually built SoHo’s art scene — not just the minimalists and the conceptualists who are most remembered, but the women who were systematically excluded from those movements’ institutions and had to build their own.
11. Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD Cafe / The Mercer Street Store Area
3 Mercer Street
Before Stefan Eins opened Fashion Moda in the South Bronx — the legendary alternative space that brought together downtown artists and uptown hip-hop culture — he ran a smaller operation called The Mercer Street Store in the late 1970s, out of a street-level storefront at 3 Mercer. The model was strict: low-cost art, no painting, no sculpture, only found objects, performance, and collage.
The Mercer Street Store embodied the pre-gentrification logic of SoHo: rents were cheap compared to the gallery district on 57th Street and the Upper East Side, so you could do things that weren’t commercially viable, that didn’t need to be, that were defined precisely by their refusal of commercial viability. Eins was one of the people who later helped introduce graffiti into the art world, connecting the SoHo scene to the South Bronx through Fashion Moda. He once said that the work at Mercer Street was “low-cost art,” but in practice what he was doing was laying the groundwork for an entirely different relationship between artists and their city.
12. Picasso’s Bust of Sylvette
505 LaGuardia Place, University Village
This one is technically NoHo/Greenwich Village, but it belongs in any serious tour of the SoHo area’s public sculpture. I.M. Pei’s firm designed the three Brutalist towers of University Village in the 1960s for NYU student housing, and Pei personally selected a piece from Picasso’s 1934 series of five busts inspired by a model named Sylvette David to stand in the courtyard.
Since Picasso never visited the United States, Pei hired Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar and Sigurd Frager to recreate and enlarge the bust using sandblasted cement — a technique Nesjar had previously developed with Picasso for other large-scale works. The result is 36 feet tall and weighs 60 tons. It was declared a New York City landmark in 2008.
Stand on the sidewalk that cuts through the property and you get one of the stranger views in downtown Manhattan: Pei’s gleaming towers, the sandblasted cement Picasso, and Forrest Myers’ Gateway to SoHo all in a single frame, with the ornate facade of what is now the Angelika Film Center closing the composition. It’s an accidental arrangement that somehow holds together.
13. The SoHo-to-Chelsea Migration
West Broadway between Spring and Prince (the former gallery corridor)
By the mid-1990s, it was over. Or more precisely, it had become something else. The galleries that had colonized SoHo’s loft buildings in the 1970s — Leo Castelli, Sonnabend, Paula Cooper, Mary Boone, and dozens of others — began migrating north to Chelsea’s former warehouse district, taking with them the energy and the institutional weight of the art world.
The shift is usually dated to the early 1990s, when rising rents in SoHo made the economics untenable and Chelsea offered what SoHo had once offered: large, cheap spaces that could accommodate installation work and heavy foot traffic without the overhead of a Midtown address. By 2000, the migration was essentially complete.
What SoHo became afterward is well documented by anyone who has walked down West Broadway in the last two decades: luxury boutiques, chain stores, high-end restaurants, and the occasional gallery holdout. The cast-iron buildings are still there — SoHo has some of the finest cast-iron commercial architecture in the world, a legacy of the post-Civil War building boom that created the neighborhood’s distinctive facades — but the artists are long gone, priced out by the very gentrification cycle they initiated.
The neighborhood is worth walking for the architecture alone. Look up. The cast-iron facades, the wide freight-loading bays converted to retail entrances, the buildings that once held sewing factories and later held Vito Acconci under the floor — they’re still beautiful. They’re just selling different things now.
SoHo’s story is the art world’s original gentrification parable, and the neighborhood has spent the last thirty years being used as a cautionary tale. But the buildings are still standing, the Earth Room is still full of dirt, and the Broken Kilometer hasn’t been turned into condominiums yet. For now, you can still walk from one De Maria piece to the other and feel, briefly, what it might have been like to live in a neighborhood where that kind of gesture was possible.