Showing posts with label SoHo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SoHo. Show all posts

February 01, 2009

Maps

It always helps to see a map! I'm currently having an original SoHo map created for this site, but in the meantime, here are three good ones I found on other sites. Click any of them to embiggen.


The nice, simple one above (which I also have up in the sidebar) is from NYCTourist.com.


This one is a lot more complex and detailed, but there are strange omissions, and a bunch of the listings are no longer accurate. For the purposes of SoHo Windows, I'm considering SoHo to be between Houston St. to the north, Canal St. to the south, 6th Avenue to the west, and Broadway to the east, but this map shows all the subway lines, so that's useful. I snagged the map from this site, but it's got some horrible talking thing that launches automatically, so consider yourself warned.


This one renders a little pixilated, but it's still pretty useful. I got it from The City of New York site.

Welcome

For many months I've been walking by all the interesting, fancy stores in the Manhattan downtown neighborhood of SoHo, where I've lived for almost eight years, and I've been thinking about the fascinating storefront windows that I've seen along these streets over the years. The window displays are as seasonal, cyclical, and fickle as fashion itself . . . and often as artistic in their beckoning commercialism.

And suddenly it struck me as sad, even wasteful, that all this mesmerizing creative output is so temporary, and almost completely unrecorded.

So I decided to build this website, doing my best to record the interesting storefront window displays that flicker and change daily around me as I walk through this little village within a city. Because these windows are in SoHo -- home to some of the world's premier fashion houses' flagship stores, uniquely original boutiques, and scrappy little idiosyncratic labors of love, all visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists seeking an unparalleled shopping experience -- the windows also serve as a bellwether of the fashion whirlwind around us, snapshots of this moment in sartorial history.

I'm not really a fashion person, although I admire it. And as you'll see from the pictures I take, especially as I'm just starting out, I'm no photographer, either. But if I keep this up, I'll get better, and this record of creative endeavor should become richer over time.

My plan is to photograph all the stores in the area once to start, and then update day-to-day as they transform over time.

As I'm just starting out, I'd love to hear suggestions on how to improve this blog.

Thanks!