21 Astor

21 Astor Place, NoHo, Manhattan, NY 10003

The north of Houston counterpart to SoHo, NoHo’s rise as a distinct NYC neighborhood is a relatively recent phenomenon. Spatially, NoHo is but a small wedge nestled between Greenwich Village and the East Village — and was previously considered part of the former. A lack of size, however, is hardly a deficiency in NoHo. Actually, it makes things all the more enticing. Over NoHo’s development, glorious mansions gave way to manufacturing buildings, which came to be occupied by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe as live-in studio lofts. Still standing and coveted alongside imposing glass condominiums, those homes join early 19th-century row houses (the Merchant’s House Museum), turn-of-the-century office buildings (the Louis Sullivan-designed Bayard–Condict Building), and others in presenting a cohesive lineage of growth and change. Four buildings encompassing the c.1830s Corinthian-columned Colonnade Row have housed everyone from the Astors and Vanderbilts to the Blue Man Group.