"SoHo," the area South of Houston Street, is one of Manhattan's best-known neighborhoods, thanks in part to the many artists and musicians who moved to the area, which was dominated by partially abandoned warehouses, back in the 1970s. Thirty years later, SoHo is still home to several art galleries and museums, but it has, since the glory years of the 1980s, become a tourist-invested shopping center for fashionable clothes, shoes and jewelry. As in Greenwich Village, a certain super-gentrification has started: the demolition of the cool buildings ("funky" old warehouses, "loft spaces," and the like) and their replacement with steel-and-glass things that look totally out of place ("uncool").
In November 2002, as part of our contribution to a horrible show at the New Museum, which happens to be located within the confines of the "New" SoHo, we mapped out the locations of publically installed surveillance cameras in the area (everything south of Houston, north of Canal Street, east of Broadway and west of 6th Avenue). To our surprise, we only found 70 such cameras: 66 installed on privately owned buildings or residences; two installed on city-owned poles or traffic equipment; and two installed on a federally owned building. On average, SoHo has only two surveillance cameras per square block, while most Manhattan neighborhoods have twice that number. (When last visited, back in 2001, nearby Chinatown had so few cameras -- only 30 -- that a map of the area wasn't worth making.)
Quite costly, video surveillance is only "worth it" when you have property valuable enough to be worth watching; it's not worth it if you don't have property worth insuring. And so it would appear that SoHo isn't completely gentrified; it still doesn't meet the precondition (the primary justification) for the widespread installation of surveillance cameras. We look forward to up-dating this map, after, say, two years, and seeing what the rate of increase (if any) has been.
By e-mail SCP@notbored.org
By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
