The Chelsea Market website was as soon as residence to the Nabisco Manufacturing unit, maker of the Oreo cookie.
Colin Miller
Chelsea Market is celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary this month, however the Excessive Line meals emporium hasn’t all the time been a culinary mecca for upmarket foodies and cooks.
Chelsea Market is most well-known for revitalizing a rundown part of the West Facet. However in an unique interview with Facet Dish, its 88-year-old founder Irwin Cohen revealed a wild experience that has included Russian cash, ex-KGB safety and a tie-up with US authorities companies following the devastating terrorist assaults of 9/11.
Within the early Nineties, the lifelong New Yorker cooked up the concept to open a meals market that will mix wholesale and retail components to advertise native entrepreneurs and artisans. However Cohen didn’t have the cash to make it occur due to a recession that had frozen financial institution loans.
So he turned to the free-flowing spigot of money capturing out of Russia after the autumn of the Soviet Union. Russian buyers helped him snap up the assemblage of 17 buildings – spanning town block between West fifteenth and West sixteenth streets, and book-ended by tenth Avenue and eleventh Avenue – for just below $11 million.
The buildings have been as soon as residence to the Nabisco Manufacturing unit, maker of the Oreo cookie, however have been now a group of dilapidated constructions infested with feral cats and “100 years of rubbish,” Cohen mentioned.
The location had additionally performed host to a grotesque triple-murder within the late Eighties. Two males had been executed within the basement and a 3rd man died from his wounds in what gave the impression to be a theft.
Outdoors wasn’t any safer. The one booming enterprise was prostitution on the in any other case abandoned streets.
“It was a really very robust neighborhood,” Cohen mentioned. “Going to work each day was a bit harmful. In truth, my Russian buyers needed to ship over retired KGB brokers.”
However flush with the Russian money, Cohen and his daughter Cheryl applied their concept of “having solely wholesale meals suppliers who would additionally then go right into a small half” of the retail enterprise.
It was a daring transfer for somebody who didn’t know something concerning the meals trade. New Yorkers, he mentioned, care about clothes, meals and shelter.
Earlier in his profession, Cohen had “a number of garment middle tenants, so I didn’t wish to construct factories or showrooms, and I had additionally managed a number of residences everywhere in the United States, so we have been left with meals, and all of us want it.”
The 2 centered on bringing in girls entrepreneurs when Chelsea Market opened on Nov. 12, 1997. Firstly, Cohen mentioned, “67% of our homeowners have been girls.”
These included Amy Scherber, of Amy’s Bread, and Sarabeth Levine, of Sarabeth’s.
The idea took off and so did the neighborhood as town cracked down on crime to shed its seedy picture.
Then got here the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults. Cohen and his daughter shortly turned Chelsea Market right into a staging level to coordinate meals and provides for first responders.
“We had vans and vehicles going 24 hours a day with meals and provides from Chelsea Market right down to Floor Zero, and we provided many of the provisions for all of the individuals who have been working down there.” Cohen mentioned.
Because the rebuilding started, Cohen landed federal contracts to develop places of work for very important authorities companies after the Twin Towers fell.
“I used to be chosen to rebuild the intelligence operations that have been destroyed on 9/11,” mentioned Cohen, a son of immigrants from Russia and Poland who grew up in Brooklyn.
“We had the joint terrorist process power and arranged crime and cash laundering for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and numerous different operations,” he continued. “That was actually the fun of my life, to have the ability to work for the US authorities.”
The Chelsea Market’s enterprise mannequin helped his tenants keep afloat within the aftermath of the assaults.
“When 9/11 occurred, our tenants instructed me that my concept of wholesale with retail was what saved their enterprise lives, as a result of individuals stopped going out to eating places however that they had good high quality meals…with good costs,” Cohen mentioned.
By 2003, the ex-Soviet buyers have been out, Cohen mentioned. Actual property agency Jamestown purchased 75% of the enterprise, mentioned Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown, which can also be behind Brooklyn’s Business Metropolis and Ghirardelli Sq. in San Francisco.
In 2018, Google paid $2.4 billion to snap up the once-languishing property.
“I feel that we did one thing good by getting the market began, and I used to be actually privileged to have the ability to work with my daughter and give you this complete concept,” Cohen mentioned. “The truth that it has survived this lengthy is known as a credit score to the individuals who reside in New York Metropolis. They assist it, and now we now have one thing that has develop into the mannequin for different comparable organizations all through the world.”
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