Manhattan's Hip New Strip

By LESLIE GOURSE

Sept. 22, 1996 12 AM PT

Share via
- Email
- Facebook
- X
- LinkedIn
- Threads
- Reddit
- WhatsApp

Gourse is a New York freelance writer and author

NEW YORK — I became aware that a trendy new neighborhood was blossoming near my Greenwich Village backyard a few years ago when a friend, jazz pianist Kirk Lightsey, mentioned the NoHo Star restaurant on Lafayette Street, a block east of lower Broadway. I had never heard of it. Lightsey, who is fluent in the tastes of cutting-edge Manhattanites, told me he loved the food--the hazelnut waffles and brioche French toast in particular. “It’s a wonderful place. I thought everybody knew about it,” he said.

The NoHo Star has a typical SoHo ambience--not surprising since Lower Broadway is an architectural and spiritual offshoot of SoHo, an acronym for South of Houston Street, the artists’ neighborhood. White pressed-tin ceiling, wall tiles painted with stars, wicker chairs, critically praised food and piped-in, calming harpsichord music are part of the NoHo Star package.

During the past few years I’ve watched the revitalization of lower Broadway spread east to the side streets as New Yorkers scratch for more affordable living and working space. The newly flourishing area slices not just through NoHo (the area north of Houston street with New York University on the west, Astor Place on the north and the East Village on the east) but south down a corridor from Union Square through Greenwich Village, NoHo, SoHo and Little Italy to Canal Street and Chinatown.

On the northern end, revitalized Union Square is surrounded by new high-rise apartment buildings. Sidewalk cafes and restaurants border the square and its popular green market (Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays). A statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi remains un-vandalized, and people have actually planted a little garden around it and placed flowers around Gandhi’s neck.

Book publishers congregate around Union Square; magazines have settled in the Village/NoHo/SoHo sections. Some publishers came here to escape the high rents in Midtown and others have never set up shop anywhere else. Time Out magazine, emulating the well-known London guide, began publishing last year at 627 Broadway, between Bleecker and Houston streets. Details, a men’s magazine at 632 Broadway, is on the same block. The trendy Paper--a hip guide to New York--entered the action in the late ‘80s at 529 Broadway in SoHo. New York Press, a news and entertainment magazine, moved into the Puck Building, a historic landmark on the corner of Lafayette and Houston, a block east of Broadway. And The Village Voice, born and reared in the Village, has moved to the Bowery a few blocks east of Broadway.

Some shops and restaurants have been observing the changes since the early 1980s. Among them is the Time Cafe in NoHo on Lafayette Street, which has a simple front room and sidewalk cafe. The Time Cafe also houses a sprawling, dark restaurant called Fez that is decorated in Levantine style with ottomans, copper-top tables, wood latticework and portraits of prominent contemporary North African women. Time Cafe and Fez are so established that they have lost their cutting-edge reputation and are now comfortable fixtures.

Across the street stands the venerated Joseph Papp New York Public Theater. It was started by the late Joseph Papp in a building that had been bequeathed $400,000 by John Jacob Astor for New York’s first free public library.

The popular, rickety Strand Book Store, 12th Street at Broadway, now 68 years old, has always stocked thousands of secondhand books. In its cellar are reviewers’ copies sold at half the retail price. The store’s staff will search its stacks for books called for by prospective customers, and there’s a rare book department upstairs.

Climbing on the bandwagon in the 1980s, the Asian/Cuban Bayamo restaurant at 704 Broadway draws a young crowd that dines on meals set out on banana leaves. The decor is a collage of color with loud rock music as an accompaniment.

Nearby, a weekend flea market in a Broadway parking lot near Waverly Place attracts shoppers from around town. And the lights of Tower Records, Broadway at east Fourth Street, have become a beacon shining every night until 12. Tower Books and Tower Video have opened on Lafayette, facing the Time Cafe/Fez, and nighttown keeps getting better.

Pen American Center, a prestigious writers’ group, moved its headquarters from the Village to the Broadway strip on the south side of Houston Street. The Antique Boutique on Broadway, with its mix of kitschy antique clothing and stray pieces of designer wear, became popular, in part, by keeping late hours. Canal Jeans, which moved to Broadway from Canal Street in the 1980s, is a store for new sports clothes and bargain-priced antique clothing.

The counterculture art galleries of the East Village suddenly moved en masse to the upper floors of lower Broadway in the late 1980s when East Village landlords raised prices and forced the galleries out. K-Paul’s of New Orleans opened a New York restaurant branch on Broadway, half a block north of Houston Street. In 1992, it became the Louisiana Community Bar & Grill with Cajun and Creole food in a lively atmosphere, huge papier-mache animals on the walls and authentic Cajun bands.

Dean & DeLuca, a famed, expensive specialty food store, moved in 1988 from small SoHo quarters on Prince Street to a 10,000-square-foot space at 560 Broadway. It has sold such exotica as purple Peruvian potatoes and Caribbean star fruit. The cheese department stocked with European imports is worth a visit. So is the cookbook department, where you can buy the “Union Square Cafe Cookbook,” (HarperCollins, $30).

Half a block west of Union Square, Union Square Cafe is a reigning restaurant of the reclaimed neighborhood. It’s a power-lunch spot for the publishing industry, and reservations are a must, particularly for lunch.

With all this sudden activity, lower Broadway constantly gets busier. Crowds of young people--women in tight vinyl pants, men in droopy shorts--go about their business in the clothing stores, striving to look more avant-garde. They create an energetic street life augmented by the sidewalk vendors who dot the strip. Stores for clunky shoes, jeans, sports gear and roller-blades abound on Broadway in the Village and SoHo/NoHo sections. National Wholesale Liquidators, which stockpiles appliances, cosmetics, underwear, coffee pots, blow dryers, body pillows--everything--between Bleecker and Houston Streets, attracts buyers from all over town with its discount prices.

Another favorite store of lower Broadway insiders is the SoHo Mill Outlet, two blocks north of Canal on Broadway. It sells Cannon and other brand-name towels and sheets, bedspreads and terry cloth bathrobes at excellent prices.

The commercial pace stepped up in the past two years, when at least 20 companies moved into Broadway buildings. In the past six months, Eddie Bauer, the Pottery Barn and Banana Republic opened on the two blocks between Houston and Spring streets.

With Broadway booming, some might suggest even becoming a bit schlocky, what with all the jeans and footwear shops, some of the fashionable action has moved to the streets east of Broadway. Lafayette and Prince streets have become particularly exciting--a trendy mini-neighborhood of shops, restaurants and galleries.

Walk east from Broadway on Prince, a block south of Houston. First you come to the elegant Savoy restaurant, which serves Mediterranean cuisine in a warm, woody room at the corner of Prince and Crosby. (Reservations are necessary.)

A short block to the east is the Benedetti Gallery, owned by singer Tony Bennett. Across the street is a fascinating Tibetan boutique, Do Kham, with $35 silk scarves decorated with ancient Tibetan tiger symbols and shawls with designs laced with silver and gold threads selling for hundreds of dollars.

At the corner of Prince and Lafayette streets is the Cyber Cafe, where you can rent a computer terminal for $10 an hour and have lunch at the same time. (There are waiting lines on weekends.) Or you can simply have a giant cup of coffee, smoke and do your office work undisturbed at a table all by yourself.

The trendiest place of all is Pravda--also on Lafayette--a downstairs bar and restaurant with only a tiny sign outside. Its specialty: a great variety of caviar. Russian beluga caviar for two costs $98; osetra for two is $59; sevruga is $48; American sturgeon is $29; salmon eggs are $18. The menu is eclectic, offering plain French fries, assorted smoked fish with blini, borscht, salads, eggs and potato chips with creme frai^che and caviar. If you’re young or rich or looking to flaunt something, this is the place to be seen until 2 a.m. weekdays, 3 a.m. on weekends.

The neighborhood has many simple, new, good places. Bistrot Margot, a long sliver of a room overlooking a garden on Prince Street between Mott and Elizabeth streets, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. I love the beef stew with a rich red wine sauce for about $12. One food critic preferred the lamb stew, which costs a few dollars more. Smoking is permitted here--notable in New York restaurants these days. Nearby, on the same side of the street, is the inexpensive, spacious Mekong for Vietnamese food. Ray’s Pizza and sidewalk cafe directly across the street from Bistrot Margot is a reminder of the day when this section was called simply Little Italy.

Around the corner on Mott Street and looking like a glorified French/American coffee shop with artful decorations and many good salads is Cafe Gitane. There are also some new Mexican places. All these restaurants draw clientele from the pool of yuppies who live in the neighborhood and Uptowners who read reviews.

Back on Broadway, on the SoHo (south) side of Houston Street, the Guggenheim Museum SoHo Store (575 Broadway) sells pop, op and modern artifacts and jewelry a few doors away from the Museum for African Art, which exhibits primarily sculpture.

From here you can walk in any direction and end up in an interesting place. Walk south on Mulberry Street (one block west of Mott) for a few blocks, and you reach undiluted Little Italy with wall-to-wall restaurants and, in warm weather, a joyous hodgepodge of outdoor cafes for dining and dessert. If you walk west on Prince Street you find the Metropolitan Museum of Art Shop (113 Prince), selling copies of ancient jewelry and objets d’art, and intimate Fanelli’s, proud of its status as the first restaurant in SoHo, with a staff self-confident about its good food, reasonable prices, unpretentious atmosphere and enduring popularity.

Farther along on Prince is Jerry’s, where fashion world stars and models take light meals in red vinyl booths.

At Raoul’s, a long established, family-owned French restaurant on Prince Street between Thompson and Sullivan streets, a steak and frite dinner costs $16.95 at the bar. All the Alsace Lorraine-oriented cuisine tends to be fine and expensive here. Even the country pate is uncommonly smooth.

Half a block west is the very chic, 2-year-old Cub Room, a bar and restaurant at the corner of Sullivan Street and Prince, whose young owner, David Meer, explains that his tables have curved edges so that “you will feel you are being embraced.” The food is contemporary American, and the music so softly played that it’s a subliminal message. Named for the dining room of the old Stork Club, this place is so happening, with its 1995 Golden Keg award for design from Hospitality Design magazine, that it could have been in NoHo, if the Savoy weren’t already there.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Broadway Bound

Antique Boutique, 712 Broadway; telephone (212) 460-8830.

Bayamo, 704 Broadway; tel. (212) 475-5151.

Benedetti Gallery, 52 Prince St.; tel. (212) 226-2238.

Bistrot Margot, 26 Prince St.; tel. (212) 274-1027.

Cafe Gitane, 242 Mott St.; tel. (212) 334-9552.

Cub Room, 131 Sullivan; tel. (212) 677-4100.

Cyber Cafe, 273A Lafayette St.; tel. (212) 334-5140.

Do Kham, 51 Prince St.; tel. (212) 966-2404.

Fez, 380 Lafayette St.; tel. (212) 533-3000.