Mar. 28, 2006 - SoHo pushes down to its southern border / the Arnold Constable building conversion (NY Times 3.26.06)

The clear lower boundary of SoHo is Canal Street, but almost nothing about Canal Street feels like SoHo – except possibly during those scattered minutes in any day when Canal is deserted by people and cars, and the electronics and plumbing suppliers and the “designer” stalls close up. As crowded as West Broadway gets with foot traffic, there is no comparison with the shoppers and pedestrians across Canal’s wide sidewalk, and the 24/7 vehicle traffic going east to the Manhattan Bridge or west to the Holland Tunnel make Canal one of the grittiest, sootiest, busiest streets in a busy, sooty, gritty city.

But the NY Times reports that one of the Canal Street venerable emporia may be developed soon, possibly for “residential, hotel or office use”. Check the link for details on the Arnold, Constable building, built in 1857 when Canal was a far more grand commercial center than for the last fifty years.

The disheveled smaller buildings on Canal Street appear generally unchanged since the days of the old SoHo…. Amid the raffish decay, the Arnold, Constable building [at Mercer St] stands out, in part for its size, and in part for its unbroken marble façade.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/realestate/26scapes.html

Reporter Christopher Gay nails the tension between Canal and SoHo:

By the 1960's, SoHo had devolved into a raw industrial neighborhood — it was as still as a forest at night, with old packing crates and cable spools left out on the Belgian block streets.

But Canal Street remained hopping, with tumbledown stores of old machine parts, new plastic supplies, food stands and similar enterprises drawing customers from neighboring Chinatown and around the city. That rambunctious vitality has kept much of the more recent real estate advances in SoHo away from the ramparts of Canal Street, with its constant bombardment of traffic.

It is difficult to imagine that Arnold, Constable building would be successfully developed as a hotel or residence without masquerading its prominent Canal Street frontage, but maybe the frontage is long enough to have a significant ‘no tacky’ zone. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.