I clicked on this artist’s loft tour by Joshua Charow for two reasons: (1) it’s the kind of big, creative loft space that I would love to have for fun, and (2) $270 per month for a SoHo loft seems kind of reasonable.
The artist is Ben Schonzeit. He moved into the space in 1972, and this was his all-inclusive gross rent. In today’s dollars, Gemini estimates this to be around $2,175 per month, which no longer sounds so dirt cheap, but remains very reasonable for a massive high-ceilinged loft in SoHo. (As an aside, I don’t think most people calculate in real dollars all that well.)
There’s a lot that comes to mind with Ben’s story:
- The creation of architectural cast iron changed the economics around ornate facades like the ones you see in SoHo. But at the time, these would have been seen as cheap replicas of the original stone stuff. Architectural purists would have derided these facades for not following the doctrine of “truth to materials.” Of course, today, many would now view SoHo as an example of “we don’t build things like we used to.”
- Cities operate in cycles. But the flexible nature of these buildings, with their wide-open spans and large windows, allowed them to be easily repurposed.
- Ben and his artist contemporaries were gentrifiers of the neighbourhood. And they would have long been displaced by the market had they not been protected by policy. One way to look at this dynamic is that they’re getting paid — through below-market rents — for the cultural cachet they created and the sweat equity they put into gentrifying the area.
One of Jane Jacobs’s famous city-building mantras was, “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”” The reasoning for this is that new construction is expensive, whereas old, out-of-favour buildings offer the low-cost leeway needed for new ideas.
This was certainly true when Ben was signing his lease in SoHo following deindustrialization. But is it still true today? The new idea du jour is AI, and that seems to require a lot of new buildings. Fifty years from now, will there be new SoHo stories similar to Ben’s?