Houston Street

Houston Street redirects here. For the Major League Baseball player with a similar name, see Huston Street.

Houston Street looking east, from The Bowery

Houston Street looking west, from The Bowery

Houston Street is a large east-west thoroughfare in downtown New York City. It runs crosstown across the full width of the borough of Manhattan, from the Hudson River to the East River, and serves as the boundary between the neighborhoods of Greenwich Village and SoHo on the West Side, and the East Village and the Lower East Side on the East Side. The numeric street-naming grid in Manhattan begins north of Houston Street, although the grid does not take full hold until 13th Street.

History

Houston Street is named for William Houstoun, who was a Delegate to the Continental Congress for the State of Georgia from 1784 through 1786. 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 Scotish 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 said to have been named, was an unknown teenager in Tennessee. Also mistaken, is the explanation that the name derives from the Dutch words huys for house, and tuyn for Garden.

• Source: "The Street Book"; an encyclopedia of Manhattan's street names and their origins. By Henry Moscow.

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

The street was widened in the late 19th century, which resulted in numerous small empty lots on both sides of the street where buildings were demolished. These lots are now used by vendors and some have been turned into 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. North of Houston Street, there is also a neighborhood called "NoHo."

Pronunciation

The street name Houston (pronounced /'haʊstən/ HOW-stin) confuses many people from outside of New York (invariably becoming one of the easiest signs of spotting tourists) because the letters "ou" are pronounced as in the word house, whereas the same letters in the name of the city of Houston, Texas (pronounced /'hju:stən/or /'ju:stən/ HYOO-stin) are pronounced like the "u" in huge. This is due to the fact that Houston Street was named for William Houstoun (note that the spelling is different), long before the fame of Sam Houston, for whom the city in Texas is named.

External links

• Knight, Sam. What a Street! (But Do You Ever Remember Being There?) New York Times, October 17, 2004.