The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Historical Studies of Urban America)

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Description

American cities entered a new phase when, beginning within the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo used to be born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-source of revenue, gentrified area. Introducing the idea—still potent in city planning these days—that art might be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo used to be the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion of the creative class.

In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists’ enclave to affluent residential area, specializing in the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment. Shkuda explores conflicts between residents and property owners and analyzes the city’s embrace of the once-illegal loft conversion as an urban development strategy. As Shkuda explains, artists ultimately lost keep watch over of SoHo’s development, but over several decades they nonetheless forced scholars, policymakers, and most people to take them seriously as essential actors within the twentieth-century American city.

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