Nuchtern House (Northeast Corner of MacDougal St. and Prince St.)

One of the most intriguing and beautiful sets of windows in SoHo belongs to the Nuchtern House, located on the corner of MacDougal St. and Prince St. The house has two addresses: 34 MacDougal St. and 205 Prince St., which just shows you how big the thing is. Besides being a lovely and very large single-family house, which is rare enough in SoHo, its four giant street-level windows positively teem with gorgeous vegetation.

I stole the above picture from the blog New York Daily Photo, because I didn't take a full picture of the whole house. On that site, I also learned that the home is owned by Anna and Simon Nuchtern. Simon Nuchtern, originally from Belgium, is a filmmaker, formerly for August Films. He now runs Katina Productions, a film and video production and subtitling services company, out of his SoHo home. The two large grates in the sidewalk on the Prince St. side are also fascinating, as there are huge windowboxes outside the below-ground windows, with giant hostas reaching up toward the sun.

I took this picture, and the following window pictures. This is the single tall window of Nuchtern House on the MacDougal St. side, showing the amazing variety of cacti and hanging plants. The greenery is so dense that you can't see past the wall of vegetation.

The westernmost window on the Prince St. side. I go out of my way to walk past these windows regularly, and I'm always disappointed when the shades are down. When I saw that the windows were open on this pass, I had to stop and take pictures.

The middle window on the Prince St. side. How long does it take to water these plants regularly? (Luckily, most of them appear to be water-retaining cacti and bromeliads.) More than a green thumb, one of the Nuchterns has a green hand.

The easternmost window of the Nuchtern House on the Prince St. side. It's a jungle in there!

MacDougal St.

In the northwest corner of SoHo is the tail end of MacDougal St., which is only one block long south of W. Houston St. on the east side. On this part of MacDougal St.'s west side, it's broken up by a short, one-way block of King St. that barely gets any traffic at all. MacDougal St. ends at Prince St., where the angle of Sixth Avenue doesn't give it room to continue, and the street merges into the narrow Father Fagan Park.

North of W. Houston St., MacDougal St. is a busy bazaar of little stores, coffeehouses, head shops, restaurants, bars, and unique, international take-out joints, mostly catering to the tourist trade and feeding the NYU students' appetites. On the south side of W. Houston St., in SoHo proper, MacDougal St. is quiet and mostly residential, and has St. Anthony's school building on it, so there is only room for a few out-of-the-way restaurants . . . and just two storefronts on the whole block.

At 51 MacDougal St. is the mysterious and eccentric Something Special, which offers mailbox and notary public services, makes keys, and sells offbeat gift items. Apparently, the store has quite a following with the local celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, Lucy Lawless, and Patti Smith.

The reflection of St. Anthony's school can be seen in the window. The school is now being used by the Cardinal Cooke Academy for Learning and Development, a school-based special education provider.

Across the street is the Koho School of Sumi-E (64 MacDougal St.), where the instructor Koho Yamamoto conducts classes in brush painting and calligraphy, and displays her own art. This is the storefront school's northern window.

Here's the southern window at the Koho School of Sumi-E, showing a Sumi-E portrait perhaps done by Koho herself.

And that's the entirety of the storefronts on the SoHo side of MacDougal St.