Thompson Street is only one street over from West Broadway, yet back in the day it was a world apart. The children who grew up to the west of West Broadway tended to be from Italian-American or Portuguese-American working or middle-class families who all knew each other and went to Catholic school. They also tended to have longer histories as Manhattanites, unlike the residents of Wooster, Greene, and Mercer Streets, the blocks east of West Broadway, where the “pioneering” loft dwellers lived.