ABSTRACT
O ne measure of the vitality of a cultural community hasalways been the number and quality of publications originating within it, as distinct from those started by outsiders trying to capitalize on the prominence of a moniker. For instance, the Village Voice was a newsprint weekly founded in the mid-1950s by people residing within Greenwich Village, initially to provide them with cultural information about their community. (Eventually, it also became a national newspaper.) The SoHo News, by contrast, was founded in 1973 by an outsider, a sometime rock concert promoter, in part to exploit the success of the Voice, with a similar size and similarly weekly publication schedule. Though the offices of the SoHo News were on Broadway below Houston Street, nearly all of its editors lived outside SoHo; most of its writers probably did as well. Having contributed a few pieces to its pages, I can recall my editor’s skepticism toward the fact that I actually resided in SoHo. It died in 1982. Later, several glossy art magazines settled in and around SoHo, even though some of them had originated uptown (or in California). Perhaps their editorial outlook changed in the wake of relocation; perhaps not.
