Houston Street

Route map:
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the street in Manhattan, New York City. For the baseball player, see Huston Street. For other uses, see Houston Street (disambiguation).
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Houston Street
Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive
(FDR Drive)

Houston Street (/ˈhaʊstən/ HOW-stən) is a major east–west thoroughfare in Lower Manhattan in New York City, United States. It runs the full width of the island of Manhattan, from FDR Drive along the East River in the east to the West Side Highway along the Hudson River in the west. The street is divided into west and east sections by Broadway.

Houston Street generally serves as the boundary between neighborhoods on the

1st Street at Avenue A.[1]

The street's name is pronounced "HOW-stən" ("/ˈhaʊstən/"), in contrast to the city of Houston, Texas, whose name is pronounced "HYOO-stən" ("/ˈhjuːstən/"). The street was named for William Houstoun, whose surname was pronounced "HOW-stən", while the city was named for Sam Houston.[2]

Description

Houston Street (1917) by George Luks

At its east end, Houston Street meets

West Street near Pier 40
on the Hudson River.

History

East Houston Street between Clinton and Suffolk Streets in the 1920s

Houston Street is named for William Houstoun, who was a delegate from the state of Georgia to the Continental Congress from 1784 through 1786 and to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.[1] The street was christened by Nicholas Bayard (b. 1736), whose daughter, Mary, was married to Houstoun in 1788.[4] The couple met while Houstoun, a member of an ancient and aristocratic Scottish family, was serving in the Congress. Bayard cut the street through a tract he owned in the vicinity of Canal Street in which he lived, and the city later extended it to include North Street, the northern border of New York's east side at the beginning of the 19th century.[4]

The current spelling of the name is a corruption: the street appears as Houstoun in the city's Common Council minutes for 1808 and the official map drawn in 1811 to establish the street grid that is still current. In those years, the

Sixth Avenue to the West Side Highway, was known as "Hammersley Street" (also spelled "Hamersly Street") until the middle 19th century,[5] and was inside Greenwich Village
. It later came to be regarded as the Village's southern boundary.

In 1891, Nikola Tesla established his laboratory on Houston Street. Much of Tesla's research was lost in an 1895 fire.

The street, originally narrow, was markedly widened from Sixth Avenue to

community gardens
.

Lafayette Street
in 1974

Lower Manhattan's

SoHo district takes its name from an acronym for "South of Houston", as the street serves as SoHo's northern boundary; another, narrower neighborhood north of Houston Street is correspondingly called NoHo
.

In 1971, Houston Street became the southernmost street in Manhattan to extend between both the Hudson and East Rivers, when the

West Street, but is closed off to vehicular traffic west of Church Street.[8]

A reconstruction project rebuilt parts of the street between 2005 and 2018.[9]

Transportation

As of 2010, Houston Street is served by the

earlier streetcar line, which is now the M9 from Avenues A to C
.

A portion of the

Broadway – Lafayette Street station as part of a larger station complex.[13]

Exit 5 on the FDR Drive is on Houston Street. The street also connects directly with the West Side Highway; however, by then, Houston Street is westbound-only.

References

  1. ^ a b c Peretz Square, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Accessed July 12, 2007. "North Street, then the northern boundary of settled Manhattan, was later renamed for William Houstoun, a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress; at the time of the renaming, the more famous Sam Houston was an unknown teenager"
  2. ^ "New York Bookshelf; An Oddly Named Street, A Dark Night, a Gamy Club". The New York Times. February 8, 2004. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
  3. ^ West Houston Street - NYC.gov
  4. ^
    ISBN 0-8232-1275-0
    . p. 61.
  5. ^ New York City Parks Department Hammersley Street
  6. ^ Gray, Christopher (April 18, 2004). "Amid the Giant Ad Signs, New Buildings Sprout". The New York Times. Retrieved July 29, 2010.
  7. ^ "Lower Manhattan Necrology". Forgotten New York. September 3, 1999. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  8. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived
    from the original on February 28, 2018. Retrieved February 23, 2018.
  9. ^ "HWM738 - Reconstruction of Houston Street" (PDF). New York City Department of Design and Construction. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  10. ^ "Manhattan Bus Map" (PDF). mta.info. Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 2015. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
  11. ^ 2nd Avenue – nycsubway.org
  12. ^ "Subway Map" (PDF). Metropolitan Transportation Authority. September 2021. Retrieved September 17, 2021.
  13. ^ "MTA Neighborhood Maps: neighborhood". Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 2018. Retrieved October 1, 2018.

Further reading

External links


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