(4 of 4)
Privacy and Meatballs. But the main virtue is simply the extreme, and now imperiled privacy. When the warehouses close at 6 p.m. and the steel doors clang, the streets go dead. There are no decent restaurants between Houston and the trattorie of Grand Street, five blocks south; the only artists' watering place is Fanelli's, reputedly the oldest continuously operating bar in New York. It has been dispensing draft beer and meatballs to the warehouse workers since the 1870s. It shuts on the stroke of 9, leaving Prince Street (on Saturday nights) to the beery wassailing of the Daughters of Bilitis, a militant lesbian organization quartered in a loft near by. There are no boutiques, no sleazy head shops hustling Moroccan love beads made in Jersey City to tourists from Duluth, no taxis, no clubs. For the casual visitor, the most baffling thing about the loft district is that it does not have a "scene" at all; nothing apparently exists behind its nobly looming iron facades except art and cotton waste. But what disappoints the tourist delights the resident artist as he sits on his fire escape in the evening, five floors up, smoking grass and listening to Dylan. For SoHo is nothing like the traditional fantasy of bohemia. It is irreplaceable, one of the few areas of New York that is neither a slum nor a spectacle.