ABSTRACT
I t seems in retrospect that from the moment I moved intoSoHo, back in 1974, the art world residing there has been threatened. One early sign was the arrival soon afterward of restaurants and gourmet food stores whose wares were not aimed primarily at the neighborhood but rather at the B&T folk. I can remember early in the 1980s counting most of the people on the street one Saturday afternoon, and realizing that they were walking too slowly as though they didn’t live here. Never again would locals predominate on weekend afternoons. Sometime later, slow walkers began to dominate the sidewalks even on weekdays, creating inadvertent obstacles for us natives wanting to walk quickly from one place to another. “Get a horse,” I wanted to scream at them.
