Downtown NYC Smackdown: SoHo vs. Nolita
(Photo: Tony Hisgett/Flickr; Corbis Images)
Each week, Yahoo Travel pits rival destinations against each other to determine once and for all which place is the best. This week it’s SoHo vs. NoLiTa, in a New York neighborhood showdown.
The Case for SoHo
When artists started settling in lofts in the great cast iron buildings south of Houston Street, they called it SoHo. By 1973, it was official, New York’s first acronym. Others followed, of course: TriBeCa (the Triangle Below Canal), NoHo (north of Houston), NoLiTa (North of Little Italy). For my own entry, I put forward HoHo. This would be the area of House and Home goods around ABC, the miraculous department store on 19th Street. But, TMI.
Still, SoHo was first, and I’ve lived here and loved it for almost 30 years. From the enormous old industrial windows of my loft on Greene Street, I’ve seen it all: artists, galleries, indie shops, the big designer names. To some, SoHo is now just a shopping mall. To me, and to most other locals, it’s a wonderful neighborhood, full of New York history: in the 1890s there were brothels and taverns all over what became SoHo. By the 1950s, many of the buildings were abandoned and desolate and it was known as Hell’s Hundred Acres.
We’re a settled downtown outpost now with expensive condos, but also families and kids. Still, it retains a whiff of earlier times. At night, when the shops close, it has a delicious urban quiet. Locals stop for a beer at Fanelli’s, the hundred-year-old tavern, or go over to Sullivan Street for sushi at Blue Ribbon. People walk their dogs. Stop to chat. Early in the morning, when the sun shines down the narrow cobblestoned streets, the cast iron buildings, with their high windows and old columns, have a certain otherworldly feel.
NoLita to the east thinks it’s hipper and younger, but let them stay up all night at those bars and cafes, those restaurants and pizza joints. Anyway, aren’t they just a breakaway from the old Little Italy? And the noise. Or am I getting old?
Getting Around the Acronyms
The happening corner of Prince Street and Houston (Photo: Scott Gries/Getty Images)
SoHo and NoLiTa (and NoHo, for that matter), are tiny. The only way to see them, shop them, eat and drink them is on foot. Best subways stops for Soho and NoLita: the N or the R, which let you out in front of the fabulous Prada flagship store, the 6 which lets you out a few steps from Balthazar, the legendary brasserie on Spring Street. If you’re going to NoHo, get out at Astor Place. You can also take the F or B, exit at Houston and Lafayette.
Famous Faces
Kim Kardashian and North West out for a stroll in SoHo. (Photo: James Devaney/WireImage)
They say SoHo is the new Hollywood and rumors are always flying that… Adam Levine might be moving here. That Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan and Femke Jensen are installed in SoHo, not to mention Mike Meyers, Daniel Radcliffe, Kim Kardashian and Kanye. (Dash, the Kardashian’s shop, is on Spring Street.)
Population
Depends if you mean SoHo proper — Houston to Canal Streets, Broadway to West Broadway, or Greater SoHo, which extends to Sixth Avenue. Around 13,000 permanent residents. Around 13 million on the weekends, it seems, when the shoppers descend.
Get in Line
Behold: The Cronut, NYC’s most famous circular treat. (Photo: Dominique Ansel Bakery/Facebook)
You want brunch on the weekend at Balthazar, the famous eggs Norwegian, the fresh oysters, the great waffles with warm berry syrup? If you don’t have a reservation, get in line. And you’ll definitely need to get in line early for those cronuts (half croissants, half donut, a million calories) at Dominique Ansel Bakery on Spring Street.
Related: WATCH: Beyond the Cronut – Tasting New York Chef Dominique Ansel’s Latest Creation
The Fim Forum on West Houston St. (Photo: teh moneda/Flickr)
Culture Vulture
The Film Forum in West SoHo is a fabulous resource for old films, classics, indies, even a kids’ club.
Movies
Martin Crosse’s After Hours captured early Soho life when it was dark, arty, and wild. Woody Allen’s Manhattan (Woody and Mariel Hemingway shopping in the old Dean and Deuce on Prince Street). Sex and the City, with those scenes over the Cosmopolitans at Balthazar. Law and Order. They’ve all taken place in SoHo.
And a Novel
Caleb Carr’s The Alienist is partly set in and around what is now SoHo and was — in the 1890s — a vicious red light district, full of brothels and taverns.
SoHo is known for its cast iron buildings, such as the famous Haughwout Building. (Photo: Tony Hisgett/Flickr)
Architecture
The greatest collection of cast iron buildings in the world along Greene, Mercer, and Wooster. The Center for Architecture offers tours.
Weather
It’s New York! It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I like winter best. It’s less crowded, more local.
Live Like a Local
SoHo’s Mercer Hotel. (Photo: The Mercer Hotel/Facebook)
Some of the best New York Hotels are in SoHo, which means you can live like a local for a night or two and experience the very best times, early morning and late at night when there’s a delicious urban quiet. There’s the Mercer, the original downtown boutique hotel at the corner of Mercer and Prince Streets. Chic and very cool, it has a great lobby where you can drink, a subterranean restaurant, and a pretty room for a lavish and leisurely breakfast.
Related: 9 New Hotels with Views So Sweet You Won’t Leave Your Room
On Crosby Street is the Crosby Street Hotel, part of Firmdale Hotels, a British group. It has spectacular city views from some of the rooms, which are huge and comfy, a good restaurant and bar, and witty décor by Kit Kemp, the hotel’s owner. Over on Thompson Street is Sixty, another boutique hotel, with a rooftop lounge. (OK, it isn’t officially SoHo here, though if you want to get technical you could call it West SoHo — WeS?)
Here’s the Thing
SoHo’s busy streets empty out at night, after the shopping crowd goes home. (Photo: Dan Nguyen/Flickr)
In spite of the crowds who go shopping on weekends, the early mornings and the nights in Soho are wonderfully alluring. Locals walk their dogs. The crowds disappear as if a plug had been pulled. So if you’re actually living here, you get to be part of it, if only for a day or two.
Safety
Just in case you were asking: It’s safe. New York is the safest big city in the country, and one of the safest on earth. Also, the locals are really nice if you take the trouble to chat.
Eat
Fanelli Cafe on Prince St has been serving up burgers and beers to hungry New Yorkers since 1922. (Photo: Ludovic Bertron/Flickr)
On Spring Street, Balthazar Brasserie is SoHo’s landmark restaurant, a gorgeous Parisian-style brasserie with gilded mirrors, red leather banquettes, smoky yellow walls, heaps of fresh oysters on crushed ice. Open from breakfast until late at night, it serves classic down-to-earth French food (brandade, steak frîtes, onion soup, a killer duck shepherd’s pie, not to mention profiteroles dripping with warm chocolate sauce). It has its own bakery, where the bread is amazing. Chic, stylish, with a famous bar (see Sex and the City), it was recently called the most baby-friendly place in town by the London Sunday Times.
For a quick burger and a beer, there’s Fanelli’s, a l922 speakeasy with red-and-white tablecloths; with its a time-worn look, this is where people who work in SoHo and locals flock for cheap grub and as an antidote to the ritzy shops and condos.
Over on Sixth Avenue and Spring Street there’s Aquagrill, one of the few great chef-owner restaurants. Fabulous oysters, wonderful fish dishes for wonderful seafood and freshest oysters. I love the peppered tuna carpaccio, the lobster-and-grapefruit salad, miso-glazed Chilean sea bass, seared diver scallops with crabmeat risotto. There’s a fine wine list and rich deserts. Eat at the bar, especially if you’re on your own. It’s what locals do, and if Ted is on, he’ll fill you in on downtown life.
For good sushi there’s Blue Ribbon Sushi, for tapas Boqueria — but for the best bargain in town, go to Picola Cucina. It’s a tiny Sicilian restaurant on Spring Street with fabulous sardines, fennel and orange salad, fresh burrata, and some of the best pasta — I love the rich boar ragu pasta and another one with squid in black in; at lunch time during the week, every pasta dish is 10 bucks.
Finally, though some would say it’s a little west of SoHo, there’s Charlie Bird on Sixth Avenue. Among the truly divine small plates are blue crab toast with chilies and cucumber or a grilled octopus saltimbocca or those chicken livers. I’d walk a long way for the slow roasted pork shoulder or crispy sea bream. Charlie Bird’s desserts include warm chocolate budino with olive oil gelato, and there’s a seriously interesting wine list.
Take-out eats? there’s always that SoHo landmark, the Dean and DeLuca flagship on Broadway.
Shop ‘Til You Drop
SoHo has plenty of big names, but be sure not to miss the smaller gems like Morrison Hotel, which offers up amazing music photographs (Photo: Ludovic Bertron/Flickr)
Where to even begin? SoHo is probably the greatest shopping district anywhere. You want high designer stuff, there’s Vuitton, Chanel, Tiffany, the remarkably designed flagship Prada shop (Is that rolling wooden floor for skating?) You want low, there’s Zara, Top shop, H&M, and a million sneaker stores on Broadway. I like to shop at the remaining one-offs, the original design shops, and few remaining galleries. My favorites? Morrison Hotel upstairs on Prince Street for great music photography — pop, rock, jazz. I also love the Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby, one of the last vestiges of real SoHo, terrific books, new, used, rare and otherwise, and all proceeds support homeless people living with AIDS.
Melissa on Greene Street for Brazilian shoes made of… plastic! Embedded with the scent of bubble gum. The shop is a delicious design venue, and those shoes are the coolest in the city. (For kids, too.)
For a terrific selection of vintage costume jewelry, there’s Deco on Thompson Street, a tiny shop stuffed with earrings, necklaces, rings, from every decade dating back to the 1920s, not to mention 500 pairs of cufflinks, from mother of pearl to kitschy cowboys. Janice Berkson, the owner, also sells amazing Lucite handbags from the 1950s, the kind your grandmother used in Miami Beach. She is amazingly patient with customers who end up spending hours in Deco.
Also on Thompson is Dosa, a shop that’s been around almost 30 years, and sells lovely clothes — shawls, pants, tunics — made of gorgeous Indian fabrics, many of them fine and filmy cottons.
Related: Smackdown: Battle of the Chinatowns — New York vs. San Francisco
On Broome Street Kirna Zabete sells the most original women’s clothing—stuff by Lanvin and Chloe, but also by the new hot fashion designers like David Szeto.
SoHo is famous for its high-end design goods, especially furniture. Some of the best shops, including Poltrona Frau (how I long for some of their red leather chairs) are located at the Houston Street end of Greene Street. And then there’s Flou, with its fabulous Italian beds, duvets, pillows, the Kartell store (all that kitsch but beautiful plastic stuff), as well as Ingo Maurer, who makes the wittiest and most beautiful lamps.
Many of the best shops in SoHo are located in huge spaces in the old cast-iron buildings. This is what drew artists and sculptures back in the day, and the spaces, high ceilings, pillars, and old wood floors give these shops a kind of grandeur.
Street Cred
Street vendors selling everything form original art to books to jewelry are a common sight. (Photo: Jason Kuffer/Flickr)
The Soho streets are filled with vendors, and some have really interesting wares, so don’t ignore them. Along the south side of Houston Street, near St Anthony’s Church, there are plenty of good stalls on the weekends.
WATCH: Sweat-Free SoHo Style
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The Case for NoLiTa
NoLiTa’s got a hip, young vibe with tons of restaurants, bars, and cafes. (Photo: Corbis Images)
Oh, SoHo, so staid, so envious of our youth. We Nolitatarians may have some hipsters in stingy brim hats, but we are still the cool acronym. Once upon a time NoLiTa was part of Little Italy — and there’s the butcher shop on Elizabeth Street to prove it, not to mention Old St Patrick’s the Catholic basilica, where hipsters sometimes join Italians and Koreans for Sunday mass.
We’re smaller than SoHo, our streets are narrower, we still have a whiff of the old immigrant days, and people come here to hang out in cafes and drink at the wine bars.
But this little ‘hood that runs roughly from Lafayette to the Bowery, along Mulberry, Mott, and Elizabeth Streets, with its old tenement buildings (where apartments rent for a bundle now), still has tiny boutiques, and the greatest street fair of all every September: San Gennaro. Seven blocks of Mulberry Street are devoted to calzone and pizza and cotton candy, to games of chance, and stalls filled with stuff to buy. Here’s where you can still see real Italians, the kids and grandkids of the original immigrants who come back to the ‘hood for the fair.
SoHo’s neighbors have the same weather, of course, the same safety record, the same means of transportation (see above).
Famous Faces
Billy Joel visiting his daughter. Will Smith. Rumors of Hugh Jackman.
Movies
The finale of Godfather was shot at Old St Pat’s. The great street festival in Godfather II, and much else, was filmed in the streets of NoLita, which back then was part of Little Italy.
Population
NoLiTa is a fraction of the size of SoHo, with about 5,000 neighborhood residents.
Get in Line
Bagels are serious business in this town. Don’t waste your time (or stomach space) with mediocre fare; go for the good stuff at Black Seed. (Photo: Black Seed Bagels/Facebook)
Black Seed on Elizabeth Street has possibly the best bagels in New York, boiled and baked the traditional way. (New Yorkers are very particular about their bagels.)
Culture Vulture
Joe’s Pub and The Public Theater on the Bowery. (Photo: Zagat Buzz/Flickr)
You’ll have to venture just beyond NoLiTa to NoHo for good culture: that’s where you’ll find the Angelika Theatre, one of the best for indie films, with a café for people watching. Head a few blocks north for big-time culture at the Public Theater; at 50, it’s got great theater, both experimental and mainstream, and there’s Joe’s Pub, the famous nightspot for music
Architecture
Old St Patrick’s Cathedral (Photo: M Bergman/Flickr)
Old St Patrick’s, the original New York cathedral has ancient graveyard and red-brick walls. North of the neighborhood in NoHo is Bond Street, for incredible new buildings and renovations of the old.
Live Like a Local
Gemma, the Italian restaurant at The Bowery Hotel, is popular with both locals and tourists. (Photo: The Bowery Hotel/Facebook)
The Bowery Hotel is very cool and has a great restaurant. What’s more, there are tons of new places to eat, drink, and make merry within a few yards in any direction. The Standard (more NoHo than Nolita) is drop-dead chic.
Eat
The legendary Cuban sandwich at Café Habana. (Photo: star5112/Flickr)
If SoHo has the great and grand in places like Balthazar, NoLiTa eats in small cafes and restaurants, drinks at wine bars late into the night, and cures its hangovers at Café Habana with a margarita. Most of the places I like here are more intimate and much smaller, and a lovely café on Lafayette is Jack’s Wife Freda, which Maya and Dean, husband and wife owners, named for Dean’s grandma in South Africa. Breakfast is waffles and the Israeli egg dish known as shashuka, with a side of duck bacon; for lunch, a chopped Israeli salad, matzo ball soup, excellent burgers. There are substantial fish and meat dishes at dinner, great cocktails. Nights are crowded with bright young things.
Next door is Ed’s Lobster Bar, where locals go early and sit at the counter for serious and seriously rich lobster rolls, for lobster and oysters, fish and chips. Don’t miss the fried pickles. Across the street is Eileen’s Special Cheesecake, the best in a city that is very very fussy about its cheesecake. Take one home. Buy a couple of miniatures (espresso, cherry, pineapple), and eat while you shop.
I also like Parm, a retro version of old-red sauce dishes: veal parmagiana, meatball sandwiches, baked ziti. For pizza, I go to Rubirosa because of the pie with sausage and broccoli rabe. Both are on Mulberry Street. A half a block south is Balaboosta, which is a Yiddish term meaning the perfect housewife, cook and lovely hostess. The restaurant is like that, with small plates that include the best hummus in town, fried olives, crispy cauliflower, and a dish called Israeli Street Fair — chicken and merguez sausage go in a pita with amba yogurt and pickles, sweet potato fries on the side. Main dishes often include lamb, chicken under a brick, black bass. Lunch here is always an oasis of calm. Next door there’s a sister restaurant that serves every kind of hummus you can imagine.
Related: 10 Pizzeries in One Weekend: the Ultimate New York City Pizza Crawl
Up north (a few blocks) in NoHo, there is very fine Italian food at Il Buco, in a rustic space that resembles a true enoteca. Nearby at the Mile End Delicatessen is some of the best cold cuts in town — pastrami and tongue for a perfect sandwich.
Oh, and for drinking in NoLiTa, there’s plenty of choice, but I like the Mulberry Street Bar best. Sometimes known as the Sinatra Bar, it’s got the world’s greatest juke box that plays Frank Sinatra, of course, Sammy Davis, and Dean Martin. The crowd runs to the cool, the hip, and the old. You can even find a real Italian here. If Tony Soprano went in for karaoke, he’d be here on Saturday nights.
Shop ‘Til You Drop
You remember bookstores, right? This one is awesome. (Photo: Garrett Ziegler/Flickr)
Like its cafes and restaurants, shopping in NoLiTa is on a much more intimate scale than in big sister SoHo. Though it’s beginning to change, there are still a lot of indie boutiques, the kind you’d think would have all moved to Brooklyn by now. First among equals is McNally Jackson on Prince near Mott, one of the last great indie bookshops with a decent café and a great magazine selection.
Nearby is Sigerson Morrison for slightly funky but exquisite designer shoes — pointy toe flats, faintly fetishistic little boots.
Related: New York’s Best Restaurants for Holiday Shopping Breaks
At Love Adorned on Elizabeth Street, there’s a wild collection of jewelry — snake rings, flower rings, pieces with gold, diamonds, green tourmalines. My favorite are the Victorian earrings in gold and diamonds, and even the top-of-the-line stuff can be had for no more than a grand or two, and some for much less.
Another jewelry shop also on Elizabeth is Erica Weiner. I love the atomic ring collection, a very sixties style. The shop will also find you a diamond bigger than the .20 carat that it’s shown with. I also love the garnet and diamond earrings set in oxidized silver.
Over on Mott is Warm, which in the summer sells vintage surf magazines, and found objects. Clothes from dozens of indie designers. Beach wear and steel drum music to make you feel you’re in the islands. This is retro hippie like no other: exotic one-off house wares, Tibetan necklaces, and now that winter is here, alpaca blankets.
It’s actually in old Little Italy, but a few blocks walk, and you must not miss Di Palo. This is the greatest Italian grocery and wine shop in the city. The huge wheels of that fine parmesan, the shipments of golden olive oil just off the boat. The prosciutto, fresh pasta, and, around this time of year, huge blocks of gianduja, rich Italian chocolate with nuts.
Street Cred
The Feast of San Gennaro is one of the biggest local events in NoLiTa. (Photo: Phil Davis/Flickr)
There’s a good outdoor market for jewelry, hats, and T-shirts along the outer wall of Old St Pat’s on weekends. But the ne plus ultra of street life is the San Gennaro Festival. Food, games, everyone loves it…except the newer shop keepers. One women who sells fancy undies complained: “people come in with greasy hands. I cannot have cannoli frying outside my store.”
WATCH: Living Large: A Spacious Home In NoLIta
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