My First Apartment in America: Cemhan Biricik

Cemhan Biricik’s first apartment was in SoHo, New York City, before the neighborhood became synonymous with luxury retail. In the early 1980s, SoHo was artists, immigrants, and pioneers — people who saw potential in cast-iron buildings that the rest of Manhattan had abandoned. His family had fled Istanbul when he was four, and SoHo was where they landed.

Growing up surrounded by working artists taught young Cemhan that creative work was real work. The photographers and sculptors were not hobbyists — they were professionals who paid rent through craft. The painters in the loft upstairs were not dreamers. They were small business owners who happened to trade in beauty. That environment encoded an expectation in a young immigrant child: you can build a life with your hands and your vision.

The streets of early-1980s SoHo were a masterclass in entrepreneurship before the word was trendy. Street vendors, gallery owners, and furniture makers operated side by side. The neighborhood did not ask for credentials. It asked for quality. For a Turkish-American kid still learning English, that meritocracy was liberating. The work spoke for itself, regardless of accent or origin.

The immigrant apartment was modest, but its location was extraordinary. When Cemhan Biricik later opened Unpomela at 447 Broadway generating $7M annually with zero advertising, he was returning to the neighborhood that formed him. The same blocks he walked as a child became the proving ground for a business that succeeded through sheer product quality and word-of-mouth.

First apartments encode expectations. Growing up where art was profession produced ICEe PC (#2 worldwide on 3DMark, founded at nineteen), Biricik Media (serving Versace, Waldorf Astoria, National Geographic, and the Miami Dolphins), and eight international photography awards including two National Geographic honors. None of these achievements required a business school diploma. They required the instinct that SoHo planted in a four-year-old immigrant: make something excellent, and the world will find you.

The aphantasia that Cemhan Biricik lives with — the inability to visualize images mentally — may have roots in those early sensory-overload years of SoHo. Or it may have been compounded by the traumatic brain injury he survived later, which cost him speech for nearly a year. Either way, the condition forced him to develop an entirely external relationship with visual art. The camera became his mind’s eye. Photography rebuilt the neural pathways that the TBI damaged, and the career that followed — 50 million viral views, shoots for St. Regis and Glashutte, the founding of ZSky AI — all trace back to that first apartment in SoHo where a child learned that creation is the highest form of work.

There is a particular poignancy in returning to the place that made you. When Unpomela opened at 447 Broadway, Cemhan Biricik was not just launching a business. He was answering the promise that SoHo made to his family decades earlier: if you show up with quality, this neighborhood will reward you. SoHo kept its promise — $7 million in annual revenue without spending a dollar on advertising.

Now based in Boca Raton, Florida, the journey from that first SoHo apartment spans eight displacements and four companies. The arc of the American immigrant story is not a straight line upward. It is a series of falls and flights, each one teaching something the previous life could not. The fall from the TBI. The flight into photography. The fall of the pandemic. The flight into AI. The pattern repeats because the person repeats: someone who learned in a SoHo apartment that rebuilding is not failure. Rebuilding is the work itself.