New York City Shopping Guide - StyleMaven: Your Guide to Unique Shopping

New York City Shopping Guide

When tourists come to shop in New York, they look for landmarks from the Hollywood version of the Big Apple. The tall slanted glass wall in the Met's African Wing from a scene in When Harry Met Sally. The dark glossy night haunts and restaurants from Bright Lights Big City and Studio 54. Tiffany's hushed elegance from Breakfast at Tiffany's. But New Yorkers, aka "insiders", are creating another, less glossy version of New York. Like most big cities, New York has many faces, neighborhoods and stores, the best of these, like Chelsea, Soho and Nolita, aren't movie-famous or about 80s excess and glamour; they're enclaves where artists have created a haven for themselves and others have followed.

Soho's retail mecca, a cobblestone-laden area of downtown New York, once considered undesirable and unsuitable for any bourgeois fashion fiend, was the first to benefit from the artistic visions of the painters, designers and photographers that lived there on a shoe string. As fashion became hungry for new faces and change, mega houses like Prada and Louis Vuitton and mega museums like MOMA began to move in, creating exciting new stores and museums with an edge. Soho became more exclusive the place to shop and live. Rents went up up up and artists moved out, bitter they had been pushed out by conglomerates. Looking for new hideaways, they moved northwest, into Chelsea and the meatpacking district. Old townhouses and factory warehouses were converted into loft spaces and indie galleries. Slowly the storefronts and restaurants began to emerge with small luxury designer shops, bakeries and restaurants de rigueur for those in the know.

Lower East Side
Once a Jewish wholesale enclave, the tiny block of Orchard Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side has become its own multi-cultural retail island, with well-curated boutiques, French bistros, and velvet-roped nightspots sprinkled among Spanish bodegas, mom-and-pop t-shirt shops, and dry-goods discounters.
>Go to the Lower East Side

Meat Packing District
Rough and tough bikers, big brawny meatpackers, uptown girls in limousines and world-renowned photographers and models all stand steps away from each other at Jeffrey, Pastis and the fashion-photo studios of Industria.
>Go to the Meat Packing District

NoLita
Not so long ago, only a few noteworthy shops dotted the landscape east of Broadway in Lower Manhattan. The neighborhood known as Nolita, or North of Little Italy, seemed quaint and trapped in amber—a hidden enclave of narrow streets, shoe stores, mom-and-pop stores and quiet affordability.
>Go to NoLita

SoHo
Small boutiques like Dosa, APC and Catherine are surrounded by larger outposts of major designers like Plein Sud, D&G, Tocca, Diesel and Louis Vuitton.
>Go to SoHo

Brooklyn
Smith Street, between Atlantic Avenue to Second Place, is ground zero for the emerging Carroll Gardens shopping scene. A slew of groovy clothing, home furnishing and accessory stores has triggered a reverse migration for New York fashionistas and is more than worth the trek for visiting style-lovers.
>Go to Brooklyn