Prince St. (between Sullivan St. and Thompson St.)

Prince St. gets a little busier between Sullivan St. and Thompson St., and it's dotted with quite a few bag, jewelry, and accessory shops. Most of these are stores that exist only in SoHo.

On the southeast corner of Prince St. and Sullivan St. is the spacious Lords News International (186 Prince St.). As you can see from the printed signs, they do film processing, provide WiFi, take passport photos, send and receive faxes, sell cold soda (and beer!) and candy, and have an ATM. They also do picture framing. Mainly, though, what they sell is magazines . . . hundreds and hundreds of magazines. Their windows on Prince St. are updated regularly, but I find the tall displays overwhelming . . . it's a blitzkrieg of media, and it's hard to focus on any one magazine cover.

Another of Lords News International's windows on the Prince St. side. I only subscribe to the New Yorker on purpose, so the vast array of periodicals here befuddles me. Who reads all these magazines? Mysteriously, I also get Time Out New York (I don't do anything they suggest), Food & Wine (because I watch Top Chef?), and Genre (deeply lame and slight) in the mail, although I ordered none of those. As a sort of joke, my mother gave me a subscription to Reader's Digest for Christmas, so I am able to follow the current frightened obsessions of the elderly and chuckle at Humor in Uniform.

At 178 Prince St. is the Ward-Nasse Gallery, displaying this arresting Jesus painting. I feel a deep fondness for the remaining galleries in SoHo, since most of them have fled the mall for the newer gallery district in Chelsea.

Hans Koch (174 Prince St.) sells handcrafted, one-of-a-kind bags, purses, jewelry, and other accessories, with an emphasis on strikingly colorful and inventive leatherwork. Everything in the store is created by Bauhaus-trained Hans Koch himself and his assistants.

Another angle on the Hans Koch window, showing more of the unique bags and clutches and the jewelry hanging on the side wall.

At 181 Prince St. is Meeka Meeko (clicking that link takes you to an obsessive slideshow video of the store's wares). This is a difficult store to categorize . . . on one hand, it's a jewelry and accessories shop, overflowing with rare, idiosyncratic, and vintage items. But the store also has gifty craft items and odd object that remind me of items you usually see in shops with names such as The Whittling Fig on tourist beach town main streets that have turned quaint in order to survive.

The western window of Meeka Meeko. I kind of like the girly pink sale scrawl on the window.

Closeup of Meeka Meeko's western window. It does give the impression that you may discover a treasure amongst the clutter.

Another closeup of Meeka Meeko's eclectic and eccentric western window.

At 172 Prince St. is by boe, another bag and jewelry store. I give the display some points for the intriguing long-necked busts showing off the accessories in front of that green panel, but those points are quickly taken away because of the crappy printed "sample sale" signs.

Prince St. (between MacDougal St. and Sullivan St.)

Sorry for disappearing for a couple of weeks . . . I don't know what I was doing, really. Nothing productive, that's for sure. I just crawled into the depths of my cave and stayed inside, floating in the ether of ineffective dreaminess. It happens. Especially this time of year, when the sun moves into Pisces.

But I've resurfaced now. These shots were taken on Prince St., heading from MacDougal St. to Sullivan St. Prepare for multiple spas and salons, but otherwise this is a quiet residential block, with St. Anthony's convent on the southern Sullivan St. corner.

Menswear boutique Sean used to be on Thompson St., between Spring St. and Prince St., but it moved to its new, seemingly-smaller, similarly off-the-beaten-path location at 199 Prince St. last summer. I've always admired the store's natty, stylish suits, and I think these are the kinds of clothes I should be wearing if I ever get wealthy enough to embrace my full adulthood. Although I'm not exactly lusting after that purple scarf.

The eastern window of Sean. I could totally see myself at some literary cocktail party in that blazer or those sweaters, but again, sans that scarf.

At 196 Prince St. is Erbe, an Italian herbal beauty spa. The inconspicuous, discreet entrance suits its elite clientele, which supposedly includes many celebrities such as Kate Moss and Lauren Hutton.

A closeup of the Erbe window, with a Gothic white banister and some cherubim from Cabanel's Birth of Venus.

Across the street is another salon, also underground, the Japanese Salon Hoshi Coupe, at 193 Prince St. Apparently, the haircuts are cheap but phenomenal, and the low-key space is comforting. But I'm stuck on that literal representation of ball-and-chain in the front.

On the corner of Prince St. and Sullivan St., across the street from the convent, is our third beauty shop on the block, Ling, at 191 Prince St. My favorite part of the Ling shop is outside the store . . . that funky tile on the sidewalk.

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!

Prince St. (South Side, between Wooster St. and Greene St.)

Heading east on the south side of Prince St., from Wooster St. to Greene St., around 3:30 in the afternoon on February 10. An unseasonably warm, overcast day. The streets were teeming with tourists.

In the storefront of 126 Prince St. is the Carrol Boyes shop, showing her range of handcrafted metal flatware and tableware. There are some odd, unique, little gifty things in here that look pretty interesting, but the window itself suffers from overkill -- with all the glittering objects, it's difficult to focus on any one thing. The hanging paper sculptures aren't helping the clutter issue. Although I do love the chunky people drawings on the ceiling.

There's a terrific handmade handle on the Carrol Boyes store door.

I just love these leftover signs around the city. This rusted old sign is advertising "Commercial Printing, Stationery, Office Supplies, Paper & Twine." Something about this relic really reminds me of an old-school Main Street shop.

The Morrison Hotel Gallery, at 124 Prince St., always has cool photos of rock stars in their window. I dig the anti-pose Kurt Cobain is striking in the big central photo (by Jesse Frohman), and the sleepy, shirtless Miles Davis pic on the left.

The painted jeweled frame in the window of Reinstein/Ross (122 Prince St.) is memorable, and harks toward the store's Egyptian and Etruscan jewelry designs, but the display case is far back away from the window, and lit so that it glows like a sci-fi incubator, making everything in it difficult to see from the street. Also, the security guard (seen as a creepy shadow in the bottom right corner of the photo) glares at everyone who walks by.

At 118 Prince St. is ultra-modern toy and clothing store Kidrobot. Apparently, that giant blue thing in the window is called a Munny, and is made of inflatable vinyl. Although my eye is more quickly drawn to the gleeful Paul McCartney figure by Medicomtoy. The mannequin modeling the fitted hoodie and skinny jeans needs to eat a sandwich, stat, even if she makes for a rather cute nerd girl. I prefer my geeky girlfriends without the horrifying eating disorders.

Yes, I realize I'm anthropomorphizing all these mannequins. But isn't that the point of mannequins?

Kidrobot's eastern window. Is this what the cool kids are wearing these days? I guess the outfits are working that retro-future vibe, but I personally would rather expire than wear a giant, useless safety-pin jammed into the front of my cap.

That's a lot of pink butterflies! Fragments, at 116 Prince St., adds a splash of color to their winter window. I can take or leave the dead trees and fake snow, but I dig the diorama in the middle.

I don't know if Joseph Cornell would love or loathe this "box" in the Fragments window, but I think it works as a great way to make the scale of a full storefront feel more intimate, and sets the jewelry in an unexpected surrealist pastoral narrative.

The Karen Millen flagship store is located at 112-114 Prince St. While I lost some of the photos of the other windows due to reflections and glare (and, um . . . focus), the blend of the snappy green military coat, the mannequin's pose, and the lights all work together to make the image feel quite ecstatic.

Not sure what to say about this display at Karen Millen, except if this alabaster creature greeted me at the door of a fancy dinner party, I'm not sure if I would pretend not to notice that she looks like a refugee from the attenuated aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind . . . or if I would run screaming. Nice, simple, flowy black dress, though, even if the pleats give her a rounded mound of tummy.

At 110 Prince St. is Face Stockholm, a Swedish cosmetics and skin care shop. This is the view through the door, as they don't do much with the storefront on the Prince St. side. I like the interior's aesthetic combination of apothecary shop and boudoir.

But my favorite thing about Face Stockholm's shop is that row of busts on top of the cabinet in the back. Freaky and fabulous.

A jewelry street vendor on the corner of Prince St. and Greene St. The guy hunched over was busy twisting wire for new ornaments created on the spot. This booth means business -- they take VISA, MasterCard, or American Express! I do enjoy the serious sparseness of their display.