SoHo Broadway Initiative

If you haven’t heard yet, SoHo has a new “neighborhood improvement” group, an all-volunteer-run nonprofit called CleanUpSoHo dedicated to keeping SoHo streets clean. I, for one, have seen a huge improvement lately.

Over the past few years, "placemaking" has become a buzz word in unrbanist circles. The term seems to have supplanted "community building" and "neighborhood enhancement," terms with somewhat similar definitions, as the key to (re)vitalizing and unifying neighborhoods.

On January 1, 2011, I started writing this blog without a clue about where it would lead. I began almost grudgingly, thinking that someone ought to be preserving SoHo's important and endlessly interesting history, but not me. Five years later, I am very happy that I took the plunge, as this project has only reinforced my conviction that preservation in all of its forms is not only important, but essential to how we situate ourselves in the present and how we envision our future.