The Lofts of SoHo

What is the recipe for gentrification? What can be borrowed from the story of New York’s SoHo to either replicate its transformation or prevent it? In The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980, Aaron Shkuda cuts through the myths of “SoHo-ization” and the marketing literature of real estate developers that promise the “next SoHo” by looking at the specific historical circumstances of New York’s economic, sociopolitical, and spatial landscape in the 1960s and 70s. Shkuda looks at the transformation of the postwar urban economy that saw the decline of manufacturing and light industries leaving vacancies in warehouse and factory buildings, the rise of New York as a center of national and international art production and exhibition, and debates about slum clearance and urban renewal as a solution to the problems of the twentieth-century city. Shkuda focuses on the artists who turned old industrial spaces into studios and homes through the “sweat equity” of their own labor as well as through political mobilization challenging zoning regulations that distinguished urban space into sectors of a quickly disappearing urban economy. In the process, SoHo artists created and popularized a new form of loft living that suggested a postindustrial future for cities by reimagining industrial space as sites for housing, museums, restaurants, and other cultural amenities.

Art · Art history · Economic geography · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Exhibition · Gentrification · Political science · Politics · Post-industrial society · Sociology · Studio · Visual arts · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law

• Sociology, Housing, and Gender

  Open Access•Rob Bartram, Robin Bartram et al.•Annual Review of Sociology•2025

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