SOHO

Abbreviation for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Soho

District of central London, in the City of Westminster, which houses the offices of publishing, film, and recording companies; restaurants; nightclubs; and a decreasing number of sex shops.

There is a flourishing Chinese community in the area around Gerrard Street.

SoHo

Commercial and residential district of lower Manhattan, New York City. SoHo lies south of Greenwich Village, and is widely known as the highly fashionable haunt of New York's artists and musicians. Its name denotes that it is South of Houston Street.

In the mid-19th century, SoHo became one of the first places in the world where cast-iron was used on a wide scale to construct the frames of large industrial warehouses and lofts. Fires would often break out in these tightly packed buildings, earning the area the nickname ‘Hell's Hundred Acres’. In the 1950s and 1960s, the now-derelict warehouses began to attract the interest of painters and sculptors for the extensive studio space they offered. Soon, SoHo was designated by the city as an area in which certified artists were permitted to inhabit otherwise nonresidential buildings. Some blocks north of Houston Street have recently been dubbed ‘NoHo’ in an effort to capitalize on SoHo's cachet.