Twenty-eight years between the first gallery and the last one worth the rent

How Paula Cooper's 1968 Prince Street loft and Leo Castelli's 1971 move to 420 West Broadway turned a manufacturing district into the world's most-watched art address.

• The First Gallery Below CanalPaula Cooper's 1968 opening at 96–98 Prince Street — the first commercial gallery in SoHo — and the benefit show that inaugurated it, with a roster of artists who paid a dollar each to hang work.
• 420 West Broadway and the Building That Made SoHoLeo Castelli moving his gallery into 420 West Broadway in 1971 — sharing the building with Sonnabend, André Emmerich and John Weber — and why that single address collapsed the distance between a commercial gallery and a loft art scene.
• Ileana Sonnabend at 420How Sonnabend brought Conceptual and European arte povera work into the same building as Castelli — whose former wife she was — and why having two floors of the same address operated as independent galleries changed how collectors moved through SoHo.
• Mary Boone and the Gallery as TheatreMary Boone's West Broadway gallery in the early 1980s — the Basquiat and Schnabel years — and how her approach turned the SoHo opening into a social performance that the art press covered as hard as the work.
• Sperone Westwater Moves to the BoweryFoster + Partners' narrow 2010 building at 257 Bowery — featuring a moving room that travels between floors — and what it means that a gallery chose an architect's building as its identity rather than an adapted industrial space.
• Why the Cast Iron Survived Long Enough to Be ColonisedThe 1971 New York City Loft Law, the cast-iron manufacturing buildings it protected, and how zoning that was written to protect artists' live-work space accidentally created the physical conditions — high ceilings, wide bays, freight elevators — that made SoHo the ideal gallery district.