The zeal for residential labels, so typical of New Yorkers, is getting out of hand. Though SoHo, the first and finest of these coinages, was useful, NoHo began pushing things. DUMBO was even dumber and NoLIta is intolerable.

What, then, to make of SoFi? This is a term recently cooked up by real estate agents to designate the southern part of Fifth Avenue between Bryant Park and Madison Square Park, with Murray Hill to the East and Chelsea to the West. The precise coordinates are unimportant, since the concept of SoFi is unlikely to catch on. But the aspirations embedded in its name are worthy of attention.

Real estate agents have long understood that neighborhoods don’t exist in Gotham unless you have something to call them. A name pulls into coherence all the scattered and multifarious doings of a district, transfiguring them into a marketable concept. Thus the name SoFi is an attempt to transform one of the most shapeless and characterless parcels of Manhattan into a residential zone, under the assumption, which may prove true, that it is the manifest destiny of the island to become entirely residential. The broker says, “SoFi!” and the mind’s eye fills with visions of young mothers pushing strollers, kids whizzing by on skateboards, and pale, male masters of the universe walking to work along tree-lined, sun-bedabbled sidewalks.

It is hard to see how such hookah-inspired reveries could ever become a reality. For the past century, this stretch of the city has been a dreary mix of manufacture and downscale office buildings. Fashion and commerce, which built up that magnificent mile from Central Park South to the 42nd Street library, have left this part of the world to rug merchants, bead stores, and hardscrabble literary agents. Rare indeed are those colonnaded porticoes and Miesian towers that define the real Midtown a few blocks to the north.

I must admit that as recently as nine years ago, I committed to print the opinion that the East Village would never become gentrified. So perhaps it is simply for want of vision that I fail to imagine how the dark, drab, treeless streets of SoFi will ever be viewed with desire by the upwardly mobile. But if this should ever happen, the very at tributes that now seem repellent – the sooty non-descriptness of the place – will seem to take on a tough, Runyonesque integrity.

For the time being, the area is not well-served by its newest buildings. The first to colonize the area was 425 Fifth Avenue, a 55-story tower designed by Michael Graves and completed some three years ago. Like much of what Mr. Graves has made in recent years, this two-toned, classical-modernist hybrid does not repay close inspection, and its design quickly disintegrates into incoherence.

Only a few months old, and not much better, is Tower 31, designed by Costas Kondylis & Partners, on 31st Street a few feet west of Fifth Avenue. This firm, which specializes in neo-Beaux Arts buildings on the Upper East and West sides, becomes distinctly more modern by the time it hits Midtown.

Forty-one stories tall, Tower 31 is something between a tower and a slab. Its base is somewhat better than the rest of it; you might almost imagine that this prolific firm exerted itself so mightily in conceiving the base that it couldn’t quite stay awake for the rest of its project, whose design appears to have resulted from the architectural equivalent of cruise control.

The base, rising to the second floor, is a frantic affair of glass and stainless steel. Slightly recessed from the street line, it is divided into five bays, two on either side of a dramatic metal canopy that protrudes some 20 feet from the building. As a sign of the designers’ fatigue, the modest and ungainly protrusion of these bays from the main facade is abruptly halted at the third story, from which point the structure becomes more or less flat. Rather, it would be flat were it not for the ungainly whitish infill that alternates with brown throughout the rest of the facade.

No better, alas, though quite differ ent, is the almost-completed 325 Fifth Avenue, also 41 stories, designed by the Stephen B. Jacobs Group.That this firm is capable of far more is proved by its Hotel Gansevoort, the shimmering metallic behemoth that commands the most eminent corner of the meatpacking district. The Jacobs Group is also responsible for the Library and Giraffe Hotels a few blocks west of its latest building.

As for 325 Fifth Avenue, it is so devoid of interest that it is almost interesting. Its mass, bristling with cantilevered balconies, recalls one of those dreary residential slabs from the 1960s – the Mayfair on West 72nd Street, for example – that have marred the sky line of the Upper West Side. Only the metallic swoosh at the very summit of this residential tower recalls, somewhat wistfully, what the firm designed in better days.

Worst of all, 325 Fifth Avenue rises above a four-story base that is intended, I imagine, to harmonize with the many small buildings that surround it. Talk about lost causes! No one is fooled by this sham humility. Both the building and the neighborhood would be far better off if 325 Fifth Avenue had the courage to act like the hulking monolith it is, and to admit that it has dashed forever the modest scale of this dreary stretch of Midtown.

jgardner@nysun.com