Monday, September 8, 2008

Noho's Etymology

Noho as a term for a section within North Hollywood can be traced to the 1980s, but its use as term for a neighborhood district can be traced at least to the early 1970s when people began applying it to a neighborhood of warehouses and factory buildings north of Houston Street in New York City. This label emerged after the parallel district south of Houston received the label SoHo in the 1960s.

New York's SoHo is probably the most famous, but it was not the first. A district in London named Soho dates to the 17th century. By the 19th century, London's Soho had become a neighborhood for immigrants, including Karl Marx in the 1850s, as well as home to a seamy nightlife of music halls and prostitution. In the twentieth century, the unconventional atmosphere of the district attracted artists and poets to its pubs and music scene, and in the 1950s coffee shops became the center of Beatnik culture. Soho also became the launch point for British Rock and Roll, with The Rolling Stones performing for the first time at the Marquee Club in 1962.

When the name from a neighborhood in one city is applied to the neighborhood in another city, some of the accumulated associations of the original neighborhood are extended to the new neighborhood.
These associations may ultimately have little connection to the complex history of the original neighborhood.

In the case of the NoHo arts district, local business leaders explicitly intended to borrow from the image of SoHo in New York, where a formerly industrial area became an arts district and then a trendy upscale shopping area.

For this reason it is valuable to provide a brief overview of how SoHo's transformation took place.

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