Houston Street (Manhattan) - History

History

Houston Street is named for William Houstoun, who was a delegate from State of Georgia to the Continental Congress from 1784 through 1786 and to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The street was christened by Nicholas Bayard III, whose daughter, Mary, was married to Houstoun in 1788. 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.

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 Texas hero Sam Houston, for whom the street is sometimes incorrectly said to have been named, was an unknown teenager in Tennessee. Also mistaken is the explanation that the name derives from the Dutch words huis for house and tuin for garden.

The narrow, westernmost stretch of the current Houston Street, from Sixth Avenue to the West Side Highway, was known as "Hammersley Street" (also spelled "Hamersly Street") until the middle 19th century and was inside Greenwich Village. It later came to be regarded as the Village's southern boundary.

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

The street, originally narrow, was markedly widened from Sixth Avenue to Essex Street in the early 1930s during construction of the Independent (IND) Subway System. The street widening involved demolition of buildings on both sides of the street, resulting in numerous small, empty lots. Although some of these lots have been redeveloped, many of them are now used by vendors, and some have been turned into playgrounds and, more recently, community gardens.

Lower Manhattan's SoHo district takes its name from an acronym for "South of Houston." The street serves as SoHo's northern boundary. A narrower neighborhood north of Houston Street is correspondingly called NoHo.