The Village

Walking on this stretch of Broadway (between Canal Street and Houston Street), you must promise me to go a bit west onto Spring, Prince and Broome Streets, as you get right into SOHO (south of Houston). This area keeps improving - also getting more and more expensive - with lots of great shops, cafés and restaurants - not to mention the apartments in the converted storehouses. Funnily enough we also have a West Broadway here; try out one of the restaurants for lunch or just a cup of coffee - it's a great place for people watching and you can hang out here for the full day. 

It is in this part of town we have another great crafts store: Purl - a good yarn store with a selection of beautiful and colourful types of yarn. Visit Purl & Pearl (see my previous blog) and you have an extremely good basis to start up your projects.

Houston Street suddenly comes up on us while going further north on Broadway. This is the street which kind of divides the old original New Amsterdam with new New York, as this is from here the famous road grid system of the city begins. 

Houston Street is not the most exiting road in the city, but it is a good marker for you to know where you are; this is also the start of all the New York University campuses (more about NYU in my next blog).

eyes on Broadway.jpg

At some point here on Broadway, you are almost being send back to Scott Fitzgerald's old New York. A pair of eyeglasses are looking out onto you, just as the famous optometrist Eckleburg add looked out onto the mechanic George Wilson's garage in "The Great Gatsby" (but that's another story for which we need to go Eastwards to Long Island!).

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald