SoHo

SoHo stands for South of Houston Street, and it has the largest collection of cast-iron buildings in the world. In the late 1800s, merchants wanted their warehouses to look like Italian palaces, and cast iron was the trick: whole facades of columns and arches were made in foundries, bolted together like a kit and painted to look like stone. When industry left, the area became so run down that firefighters called it Hell’s Hundred Acres. In the 1960s, artists moved into the empty lofts, at first illegally, and fought off Robert Moses, who wanted to run an expressway right through. Today SoHo is a place of designer stores and expensive lofts, but the cast-iron palaces are still here. Look up as you walk.