Two of New York's best neighborhoods for walking are Soho and Greenwich Village, and in this segment we're going to take you on a stroll through the area, starting out with several minutes wandering through Soho, which is the neighborhood south of Houston Street. It had been a rundown industrial neighborhood with factories, warehouses and truck-loading ramps, but in the last 40 years, it became New York's supreme cutting-edge, artistic neighborhood. Soho got more and more popular as lots of artist moved in, attracted originally by cheap rents in illegal lofts.
From the late 1960s, art galleries came in, and then restaurants and trendy shops followed.
Prices skyrocketed to a point where only the wealthiest dot-comers can live there now.
The artists have been squeezed out and relocated to Brooklyn, Jersey, the East Village and Lower East Side, but with a similar sequence of changes now happening there too in that never-ending process of gentrification.
Big money has taken over most parts of the city.
We walk north to the Village along Broadway, cross Houston Street. It just takes a few minutes passing more interesting blocks of the city with coffee shops and little markets, which soon brings us to the NYU student section.
We'll go through Washington Square Park, down McDougall, over to Bleecker Street and into the West Village where we will spend most of our program, especially walking along Bleecker Street.
You can walk almost anywhere, any which way you want in the Village and have a great time, but we're going to show you a suggested route that hits a lot of the highlights.
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