Block #3: Crosby Street between Grand & Broome — SoHo
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Our last two posts used Placemeter data to cover blocks in Midtown neighborhoods with a strong mix of retail and business addresses. We showed how the pedestrian movement data can tell you a story of people moving to and from work, happy hour, and shopping. What happens, though, when you analyze the data from a less predictable block? See below in our third installment of Blocks of New York!
SoHo is a world famous neighborhood located in an already world famous city. Once the epicenter of NYC’s avant-garde art scene, SoHo is now the epicenter of NYC’s slightly less avant-garde, but massively more lucrative, art gallery and retail scene. Despite its rather commercial nature and sky-high property prices, SoHo somehow maintains a charm that makes it one of the few tourist-centric places that most bonafide New Yorkers would gladly visit.
One reason for that is the quiet side streets that peel away from SoHo’s main thoroughfares. Anyone feeling crushed by the (in)humanity of the shopping masses can find refuge in cobble-paved blocks where you might run into someone famous or stumble upon a neo-hipster fashion boutique.
Today we’re looking at one such block, cobblestones and all: Crosby Street between Grand and Broome.
First, let’s run through some basic facts about our block:
Building Breakdown
7 mixed use buildings, residential and retail
2 residential buildings, one walk-up, one elevator
2 commercial buildings
Key Numbers
1900— the year all the buildings on this block were built (there’s that SoHo charm again)
$1,898.59 — listed residential sale price per square foot from 2005–2014 (Streeteasy)
1 — number of surf shop-combination-espresso bars (seriously, it’s SoHo)
Now that we’re well acquainted with our block, let’s dive into the pedestrian movement data. According to Placemeter, this is the average pedestrian traffic you’ll see on the block per hour in the winter (sampled from about a three-week period in January and February):
Though the weekend and weekday trends are relatively similar, their differences can tell us something about the subtle nature of quiet SoHo blocks.
Notice how on the weekday, there’s a steady, steep climb of early risers into the rush hour peak of 9:00 AM. Then you have the morning quiet period, too early for shoppers, too late for residents to rush to work. Traffic picks up again around lunch time, when more people are shopping, perhaps trying on some Bonobos pants, getting their board waxed while sipping an espresso (you can’t make this stuff up!), or perking up their curls.
After lunch, the activity plateaus until it picks up again around 4:00 PM, when people are shopping more and returning home. With no bars or late-night stores on the block, it’s pretty quiet at night.
The weekend follows a similar pattern, though more people wake up late, and there’s a steady, steep climb toward the peak brunch hours of 11:00 AM–3:00 PM. Balthazar is the next block over, so that should come as no surprise — the place is a brunch factory (we mean that in the best sense).
What’s interesting is the steep spike at around 5:00 PM, where we suspect people are either shopping or heading out for dinner and drinks. Of course, there’s also more traffic on average during the weekend than the week: more time for shopping and haircuts, and we can clearly see more and more people going out/getting home later (11:00 AM-5:00 PM) toward the end of the week!
Since a lot of this traffic is retail related, we wondered how cold weather affects pedestrian traffic on this block.
Unlike our other two profiled blocks, which heavily rely on commuters undeterred by cold weather (unfortunately for us working folk), we had a sneaking suspicion that pedestrian traffic volume would correlate to how cold it is outside.
So, we pulled historical weather data from Weather Underground and crunched some numbers. Here’re the weather stats for our three-week period:
Average temp: 29º
Max temp: 42º
Min temp: 12º
Median temp: 30º
It’s cold out there! Next, we figured out the average pedestrian traffic based on how cold it is outside, suspecting that pedestrian traffic would heavily correlate to the temperature range:
As you see, our suspicions were confirmed! The graph clearly shows that way more people show up when it’s warm outside, versus when it’s Hoth-level cold.
But, alas, our pursuit of truth spoiled our perfect little graph above. It’s generally colder at night, and we already proved above that there are far fewer people at night on this block, so maybe the decline in average pedestrian volume per hour has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the time of day. (We’d consider the opposite but then we might fall into a blackhole of data and never return.)
So, we crunched the same graph with traffic numbers only between 5:00 AM and 9:00 PM, and…the trends stay the same, though are overall less severe. Suspicions double confirmed!
One last interesting tidbit to look at is pedestrian direction, Northbound to Southbound. Overall, you’d guess that there would be more pedestrians headed North, what with Balthazar and Soul Cycle positioned just one block up. But, in fact, more people overall head South when walking on the block, perhaps drawn by the more dubious wares of Canal Street, found just a couple blocks below:
No matter the data, you should visit this block! It’s a perfect picture of the quiet, cobblepaved SoHo side street that even the hardest of New Yorkers daydream skipping through in the rain.
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The BONY Team
Download the datasets: 1 2 (CSV)
Sources: Placemeter Data, Google Maps, PLUTO data, bdon.org, Weather Underground, StreetEasy.
Interested in Placemeter? info@placemeter.com
