Get your fashion fix on N.Y.C.'s Elizabeth Street

Get your fashion fix on N.Y.C.'s Elizabeth Street

Rick Nelson, Star Tribune

My credit card was burning a hole in my pocket.

As well it should have been. I was in New York City, the nation's style capital, and in the gleeful position of facing nearly limitless browsing possibilities. I quickly ran through a few options in my mind. Should I pretend I'm in a much higher tax bracket and stroll Madison Avenue's spendy boutiques? Or convince myself that I'm a good decade younger and whirl through the East Village?

I was so antsy to start testing my MasterCard's outer limits that I'd totally blanked on two words of advice given to me back home: Elizabeth Street.

I pulled out my subway map, and 10 minutes later I was boldly going where I had rarely been before, to NoLIta (shorthand for North of Little Italy). Sure, I'd visited the area a few times, years ago, once to buy cheese at DiPalo's, another because I got lost on my way to Chinatown.

This was not the NoLIta I dimly remembered, a ghastly tourist trap with a fake Italian ambiance, like Epcot in NYC.

My friend and I walked a few blocks until we stumbled, Brigadoon-like, upon a single, highly shoppable block on narrow Elizabeth Street (named, I later learned, for a distant relative of Peter Stuyvesant, governor of the Dutch colony that became New York). It took a moment to realize what was so unusual about the micro-neighborhood, but then it dawned on me: Beyond the lack of New York's ubiquitous sidewalk vendors, there was a refreshing absence of familiar chain stores. The street's skinny tenements, once packed with Italian immigrants, may not be suitable for national retailers' formulaic real estate requirements, but it turns out that their storefronts are ideal incubators for the block's nearly two dozen fashion and home furnishings entrepreneurs.

The eclectic, you-gotta-see-this merchandise mix -- up-to-the-minute men's and women's wear, kid's clothing, tabletop items, gifts, jewelry, even a store with nothing but Day-Glo colored pillows -- occurs in one of the bizarre vagaries of Gotham real estate: The primo shopping abruptly stops south of Prince Street and north of Houston Street. It's the embodiment of the New York shrug that says "Don't ask me."

Based upon a number of shamelessly eavesdropped conversations, I discerned that the area was a native habitat for trend-obsessed Manhattanites, but few tourists.

Could it be that Elizabeth Street is so new that it's not yet a blip on the guidebook radar? Maybe. One thing's for sure: The upscale prices no doubt reflect high rents. Elizabeth Street may not be 5th Avenue, but it's still in Manhattan, which explains the dent in my plastic.

By the time I returned to Elizabeth Street eight months later, three of my favorite boutiques had closed and new ones appeared to be replacing them. No problem. The street still had its one-of-a-kind vibe. Besides, I'm confident that a previously unnoticed neighborhood will follow Elizabeth Street's example and become the next in-the-know destination, just another snack feeding New York's voracious appetite for the latest and greatest -- which is why it's hard to shop anywhere else.