Customer Reviews

Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artist's Colony

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Author Kostelanetz was a long-time Soho resident and writes a personal account about the history of Soho as an artist's neighborhood. The most interesting parts of the book are the beginning in which he describes Soho's slow transformation from a daytime industrial district into the thriving artist colony it was to become. I lived in lower Manhattan for much of the same period and can recall many of the people and places he describes.

The problem with this book is that there is no story, no narrative trajectory, no structure. The chapters appear to be loosley based on certain themes, although even those are hard to discern at times. There's nothing chronological; it's just a rambling collection of reminiscences with no cohesion or thread to hold it together or make it engaging. The author's nostalgic point of view (criticized in the Publisher's Weekly review above) would be fine if he stayed with it and honed in on it; but as is, it's just an uneven mish-mash of nostalgia and memories weaving in and out of splatterings of facts, with no order or trajectory. I have to honestly say I only got halfway through this book, so it may have improved by the end. But it just wasn't worth it for me to force myself through what felt like literary packing peanuts when there's so much other good stuff out there to read.

It needn't be this way. For example, Legs McNeil authored an excellent history of punk rock taking place mostly in New York at about the same time as this book (see "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" elsewhere on Amazon.com). The latter shows that a recent period of New York history can be conveyed in oral remembrances in a way that both informs and captivates the reader. Such an approach would have taken more labor and forethought -- something that is sorely lacking in this volume.

Richard Kostelanetz has created a unique detailed study of the entire SoHo art scene's Rise & Fall, along with photos. Besides an authoritative, detailed narrative -- it's a great detailed study of every aspect of SoHo's evolution & demise by an a great author who settled there from the very beginning & took pains in getting to know just how it came together. in many dimension Richard clearly records every aspect in a knowing, cogent, narrative form through 2003. This is it! There can be no other. Take it from one who was also there. Bill Rabinovitch 2011