Editing Houston Street (section)

==History==
[[File:East Houston Street 1920s.jpg|thumb|East Houston Street between Clinton and Suffolk Streets in the 1920s]]

Houston Street is named for [[William Houstoun (lawyer)|William Houstoun]], who was a delegate from [[Georgia (U.S. state)|the state of Georgia]] to the [[Congress of the Confederation|Continental Congress]] from 1784 through 1786 and to the [[Constitutional Convention (United States)|Constitutional Convention]] in 1787.<ref name=Parks>[http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/hs_historical_sign.php?id=6509 Peretz Square], [[New York City Department of Parks and Recreation]]. Accessed July 12, 2007. "North Street, then the northern boundary of settled Manhattan, was later renamed for William Houstoun, a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress; at the time of the renaming, the more famous Sam Houston was an unknown teenager"</ref> The street was christened by [[Nicholas Bayard#Descendants|Nicholas Bayard]] (b. 1736), whose daughter, Mary, was married to Houstoun in 1788.<ref name="STREETBOOK">Moscow, Henry. ''The Street Book: An Encyclopedia of Manhattan's Street Names and Their Origins.''  New York: Fordham University Press, 1990.  {{ISBN|0-8232-1275-0}}. p. 61.</ref> The couple met while Houstoun, a member of an ancient and aristocratic Scottish family, was serving in the Congress. Bayard cut the street through a tract he owned in the vicinity of [[Canal Street (Manhattan)|Canal Street]] in which he lived, and the city later extended it to include [[North Street (Manhattan)|North Street]], the northern border of New York's east side at the beginning of the 19th century.<ref name="STREETBOOK"/>

The current spelling of the name is a corruption: the street appears as ''Houstoun'' in the city's Common Council minutes for 1808 and the official map drawn in 1811 to establish the street grid that is still current. In those years, the [[Texas]] hero [[Sam Houston]], for whom the street is sometimes incorrectly said to have been named, was an unknown teenager in [[Tennessee]].<ref name=Parks/> Also mistaken is the explanation that the name derives from the [[Dutch language|Dutch]] words ''huis'' for ''house'' and ''tuin'' for ''garden.''<ref name="STREETBOOK"/> The narrow, westernmost stretch of the current Houston Street, from [[Sixth Avenue (Manhattan)|Sixth Avenue]] to the [[West Side Highway]], was known as "Hammersley Street" (also spelled "Hamersly Street") until the middle 19th century,<ref>[http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M120B/ New York City Parks Department] Hammersley Street</ref> and was inside [[Greenwich Village]].  It later came to be regarded as the Village's southern boundary.

In 1891, [[Nikola Tesla]] established his laboratory on Houston Street. Much of Tesla's research was lost in an 1895 fire.

The street, originally narrow, was markedly widened from Sixth Avenue to [[Essex Street (Manhattan)|Essex Street]] in the early 1930s during construction of the [[Independent Subway System]]'s [[IND Sixth Avenue Line|Sixth Avenue Line]]. The street widening involved demolition of buildings on both sides of the street, resulting in numerous small, empty lots.<ref>{{cite news |title=Amid the Giant Ad Signs, New Buildings Sprout |first=Christopher |last=Gray |url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02EFDC1E38F93BA25757C0A9629C8B63 |newspaper=The New York Times |date=April 18, 2004 |access-date=July 29, 2010}}</ref> Although some of these lots have been redeveloped, many of them are now used by vendors, and some have been turned into playgrounds and, more recently, [[community garden]]s.

[[File:WALL PAINTING ON A BUILDING ON HOUSTON STREET IN NEW YORK CITY'S MANHATTAN. THE INNER CITY TODAY IS AN ABSOLUTE... - NARA - 555910 crop.jpg|thumb|left|Houston Street at [[Lafayette Street (Manhattan)|Lafayette Street]] in 1974]]

Lower Manhattan's [[SoHo]] district takes its name from an [[acronym]] for "South of Houston", as the street serves as SoHo's northern boundary; another, narrower neighborhood north of Houston Street is correspondingly called [[NoHo, Manhattan|NoHo]].

In 1971, Houston Street became the southernmost street in Manhattan to extend between both the Hudson and East Rivers, when the [[World Trade Center (1973–2001)|World Trade Center]] was constructed and deprived [[Fulton Street (Manhattan)|Fulton Street]] of that title.<ref name="Southernmost">{{cite web |title=Lower Manhattan Necrology |url=https://forgotten-ny.com/1999/09/lower-manhattan-necrology/ |website=Forgotten New York |date=September 3, 1999|access-date=April 22, 2020}}</ref> With the reconstruction of the [[World Trade Center (2001–present)|World Trade Center]], Fulton Street was extended past Church Street to [[West Street (Manhattan)|West Street]], but is closed off to vehicular traffic west of [[Church Street and Trinity Place|Church Street]].<ref name="NYTimes-WTCSite-Intersection-2014">{{cite web |last=Dunlap |first=David W. |title=At World Trade Center Site, Rebuilding Recreates Intersection of Long Ago |website=The New York Times |language=en-US |issn=0362-4331 |date=August 1, 2014 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/nyregion/rebuilding-recreates-intersection-of-long-ago.html | access-date=February 23, 2018 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180228161540/https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/nyregion/rebuilding-recreates-intersection-of-long-ago.html | archive-date=February 28, 2018 | url-status=live }}</ref>

A reconstruction project rebuilt parts of the street between 2005 and 2018.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.nyc.gov/html/ddc/downloads/pdf/brochures/hwm738.pdf |title=HWM738 - Reconstruction of Houston Street |publisher=New York City Department of Design and Construction |access-date=November 16, 2022}}</ref>