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Sometime in the 1990s, several huge and well-appointed cosmetics stores appeared, selling a more expensive kind of artistic paint; but unlike ground-level stores selling art or high-end furniture that had few visible customers, these Lipstick District retailers attracted crowds of shoppers, or at least browsers. Another index around 2000 was the proliferation of very skinny women with well-painted faces, often taller than I am, customarily strolling alone in eye-enticing outfits on SoHo streets, walking as only fashion models can, their long legs resembling scissors (or castrating implements), in sum reflecting the arrival of modeling agencies in SoHo.

In 2001, especially in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center only two kilometers south, SoHo had enough empty ground-floor spaces to prompt fear for its retailing future. Then, in mid-2002, Apple Computer opened a spectacularly designed outlet exclusively for its products that was so successful, at least at drawing walkers off the street, that it seemed likely that other high-tech retailers would follow. Those slower to acknowledge Artists’ SoHo’s decline can point to the emigration en masse throughout the 1990s of not only the commercial galleries but the alternative spaces to West Chelsea, which became the center of the art merchandising (but not artists’ living).

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