Sex and the City

16. SoHo

New York, NY

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When Carrie goes shopping for a new desk, she is not really in a furniture store but in a lighting store called Luce Plan in Soho. Also, the scene where Carrie and Miranda are in the Valentine's Day-themed restaurant was filmed at Raoul's restaurant in Soho. Luce Plan is an upscale lighting shop that strives to create, in its words, "lighting fixtures that have not been designed for short-lived wonder, but to be the natural outlet of a continuous, ongoing drive dedicated to the essence of every project, a fastidious care of detail and steady improvement." Raoul's restaurant is a bistro that serves French food and has been in operation since the 1970s. Quite a feat, given New York's notoriously fickle restaurant scene. In addition to Sex and the City, the movie The Departed was also filmed here. Soho has the downtown lofts to make it cool, the cobblestone streets to make it historic, the art galleries to make it creative, and the unbelievable fashion and restaurants to make it divine. The name SoHo, given in the 1970s, is short for "South of Houston Street" and is also an homage to the Soho neighborhood in London. In the 1600s it was farmland. In the 1800s it had various forts. Eventually a canal was built and then later filled in, hence "Canal Street". In the mid-1800s, buildings made of masonry and cast iron were built, along with high-end stores and hotels. It was quite a destination for arts, entertainment, and brothels, but eventually fell into decline as the red-light district drove out residents. By the 1950s, it was called "Hell's Hundred Acres" because there was nothing in Soho but small factories and sweatshops. Luckily, in the 1960s, artists became attracted to the tall lofts and started moving in - and with them, eventually all the other facets that we see today. Movies shot here include Men in Black, Ghost, Unfaithful, Hitch, Little Nicky, Spiderman, Raising Helen, and After Hours.