New York’s SoHo neghborhood has become a paradigm for artist-driven urban development in former idnsutrial neighborhoods. Yet, less is understood about how artists shaped SoHo’s transition from industrial area to bohemian enclave to upper-income neighborhood. Historians have only begun to examine the origins of post-WWII gentrification in American cities, and scholarly theories of gentrification and the “creative” class rarely treat artists as historical actors. A historical study of SoHo demonstrates how artists’ housing needs, political organizing, entrepreneurship, and the novel arguments they created about the role of the arts in the city generated new forms of urban living and altered scholarly understanding of the importance of the arts in urban life.