A Study of SoHo

I live in the neighborhood officially named SoHo (South Of Houston), and what a zoo it can be. The fact that every major store of every brand and company imaginable claims its home in SoHo inevitably means that there will be an inordinate number of consumers plaguing the area from opening time to closing. The biggest evidence of this is that if one goes outside in SoHo at around 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning (like I did yesterday) then one will find a barren wasteland devoid of almost all human activity. If one goes outside three or four hours later at 11 or noon, then one will find swarms and swarms of festering tourists and shoppers walking aimlessly around the neighborhood. And if one happens to go out again at say 10 o'clock that night then the area will have returned to it's natural desolate state. There are people who dawdle and slowly move down the sidewalk, usually because they don't have a set destination and instead want to go everywhere in the neighborhood, and then there are the fast-paced people who know where they're going and have a set objective to complete. SoHo is the meeting ground for this subjective duality. In certain residential areas of Brooklyn, for example, there are hardly any stores, so one's objective in being there would almost always have to be visiting someone who lives there, or returning to their own home. But SoHo not only has stores and restaurants and hotels, it also has many, many lofts and apartments. The neighborhood is also conveniently located in the center of the island, and the midpoint of downtown, so to get from one side of the island to the other one has to pass through SoHo. I've found that people come to SoHo for all different reasons, but the point is that as Park says, everyone there is defined by their own interests.