Chang W. Lee/The New York Times  On Prince Street between Wooster and Greene, cast-iron facades lend an elegant aesthetic to merchandise â whether it festoons store windows or covers a vendor's table. Visitors, often drawn in large numbers, can exasperate residents.  TAKING up residence in SoHo is for neither the light of wallet nor the faint of heart. Home to the world’s largest collection of buildings with cast-iron facades, the area possesses a powerful aesthetic allure, no less for luxury retailers and swarms of tourists than for homeowners.  Upstairs in converted 19th-century industrial and commercial buildings, spacious co-op lofts with soaring windows sold for an average of $2.65 million this year. Downstairs, the ground-floor spaces are often boutiques purveying such necessities as $1,200 bespoke jeans and $38,000 sofas. On weekends, major streets like Prince and Spring are often so clogged with vendors and shopping-bag-laden tourists that residents can find it tough to run out and get a quart of milk.  “Some people get really angry about it and charge through the crowds,” said Siim Hanja, a senior vice president of Brown Harris Stevens, who has lived in SoHo most of the last 30 years. “But the relief is to go home to your loft, three, four, five stories up, and you’re above it all.”  Along with the crowds comes a cosmopolitan atmosphere that has increasingly attracted loft buyers from overseas, brokers say — especially as Europeans and others have had favorable exchange rates at their disposal. “It’s such a supremely high-end neighborhood, but of a certain kind,” Mr. Hanja said. “It’s become New York’s premier pied-à-terre community.”  Rajan Kohli, who grew up in India and now owns a pharmacy in the Bronx, has contributed to SoHo’s international flavor as both buyer and seller. Over the last decade, he and his wife, Cigdem, a Turkish interior designer, have made a tidy business buying Broome Street lofts, renovating them and reselling them. One of his buyers was an Italian businessman whose son was attending New York University. Another was a Lebanese banker.  “SoHo makes it easier for them not having to fight co-op boards, which on the Upper East Side can be a problem,” Mr. Kohli said, echoing brokers who point out that some boards are not comfortable with foreign financial statements. “SoHo is more accepting of foreigners.”  Around New Year’s in 2007, the Kohlis moved with their daughter into a 3,000-square-foot loft on Greene Street, for which they paid $2.57 million. A former art gallery with a kitchen and a bathroom at the rear, it had 15-foot ceilings, cast-iron columns with Corinthian capitals, and about 35 linear feet of windows. When they removed kitchen cabinets, a fireplace revealed itself.  “I flipped over that,” Mr. Kohli said. “Just imagine. You can’t find these things in a standard apartment.”  Initially discomfited by the distinctly SoHo noise of truck wheels on quaint Belgian-block streets, the Kohlis created a small library as a buffer area between the windows and their bedroom. They then equipped their bedroom with a glass door and more windows, which let in the morning light while keeping out noise.  Now, surrounded by 19th-century architecture and a Babel of foreign tongues when he walks his neighborhood, Mr. Kohli feels at home in every way. “To me,” he said, “SoHo offers an island of sorts, which is in America yet feels like it could be anywhere — London, Istanbul, Bombay — and still not feel out of place.”  Broadway between Houston and Canal often seems as crowded as Bombay. Every day, tourists from all over the world descend on mass-market emporiums like Old Navy, H & M, and the Japanese retailer Uniqlo, whose vast SoHo store has been so successful since it opened in 2006 that two more Manhattan stores opened last month. Lines for taco trucks snake along the sidewalk. Garbage spills from trash cans.  A proposed business improvement district, or BID, for SoHo’s Broadway corridor, to be financed by assessments on property owners, was approved by the City Planning Commission in January, despite having been overwhelmingly rejected by Community Board 2, an advisory group. A board concern was that efforts to draw in even more tourists would harm the quality of life for SoHo’s 8,600 residents. An amended proposal for the BID, which requires residential owners to pay only $1 a year, awaits a City Council hearing.
A cosmopolitan atmosphere and crowds of tourists are all packed into a historic district that offers an embarrassment of visual riches.