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No, not all the galleries have deserted SoHo. Despite the burgeoning scene in nearby Chelsea, there are still several dozen galleries in SoHo that are doing quite well, thank you. Perhaps most aren’t quite so cutting-edge, but then again they don’t try to make your eyeballs bulge the way so many of those Chelsea places do.

Sure, SoHo has had its ups and downs. But it’s always been that way. In the early 19th century, the area was the most populous and fashionable in Manhattan. By mid-century, casinos, music halls and bawdy houses made incursions. Later, five- and six-story cast-iron commercial buildings crowded the same narrow streets. Many of these structures, which still stand, boasted neoclassical facades ornamented with cornices, pilasters and pediments, which distracted from the fact that some were nothing more than sweatshops.

In the first half of the 20th century, the district south of Houston Street (hence its acronym) became a kind of an urban ghost town. One designation dismissed the area as “Hell’s One Hundred Acres.” Gradually, artists took up residence in the 1960s, then the galleries came in the ’70s, followed by a tsunami of retailers. Today, purveyors of the basics like Phat Farm and J. Crew as well as the upscale names like Chanel and Prada add a mercantile gloss to the neighborhood.

Contemporary outsider art as well as more traditional forms of folk art are featured at the American Primitive Gallery, 594 Broadway, Suite 205. Brightly colored ice-fishing decoys, the size of well-fed sardines, start at just $75 but swim into the high hundreds, while an almost life-sized tack-shop horse, with a gracefully arching neck, crosses the finish line at $7,500. Nearby, photographs of a glowing autumnal forest by Christopher Burkett and a hoary lion crouching in tall grass by Frans Lanting are among the nature photographs hanging on the chocolate-brown felt and gray flannel walls of The Edward Carter Galleries Ltd., 560 Broadway, Suite 406. Works by the former are $750 to $10,000; the latter, whose photographs appear in National Geographic, range from $900 to $2,200.

Two blocks west, the ardent collector can pick up a Leonor Fini oil for $1 million at CFM Gallery, 112 Greene, which shows paintings that are “a logical continuation of Hieronymus Bosch through the Renaissance, Symbolism, the Viennese Secession to the edge of Surrealism,” according to owner Neil Zukerman. The Fini is whimsically titled “Hurry, Hurry, Hurry, My Dolls Are Waiting,” which one should recite “in a carnival barker’s cadence.” The painting depicts seven female figures in various stages of dress and undress that represent the multiple sides of the artist’s personality. Most works in the gallery range from $1,000 to $350,000 but if money is an object, a Fini postcard is just $2.