New York City's Lower East Side on the move.....
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Luis Meat Market in the Essex Street Market.
A Move for the Essex Street Market
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
There’s a point at which even the most emphatic preservationist must
acknowledge the indulgence of nostalgia. Not every building is in every
instance worth saving; not every vanished way of life is worth
enshrining. If you believe that cities ought to maximize their options
for affordable living space rather than accommodate the best-off, then
arguments for keeping things as they are often remain incompatible with
arguments for how things ought to be. And yet, mourning is so often the
reflex that overcomes us, whenever we hear that a certain patch of land
in New York will dramatically alter, a certain structure will go to
dust.
What we would be lamenting if we were to bemoan the construction of Essex Street Crossing,
the 1.65-million-square-foot mixed-use complex, renderings of which the
city recently released, is essentially the loss of parking lots that
the city has for decades tried to reimagine. The development, which will
be erected over various sites near the intersection of Essex and
Delancey Streets in Lower Manhattan, will include 1,000 units of housing
(both rental apartments and condominiums), half of which will be made
permanently affordable to those families with yearly household incomes
ranging from $31,000 to $133,000. The project includes a site for Head
Start programs, a community center run by the 100-year-old Grand Street
Settlement, office space, retail space, a rooftop farm and a museum.
The prospect of glass towers inevitably (and too often rightly) breeds
skepticism. In this case, the planned relocation of the 73-year-old,
city-run Essex Street Market,
from one side of Delancey Street to what will be a glitzier building on
the other, has been the focus of a certain degree of emotion and worry.
Last year, the community circulated a petition
to keep the market in its current location. Ironically, it wasn’t so
much the utilitarian-looking 1940 building that seemed to move
detractors as what the market had come to symbolize in an era of
gentrification.
The Essex Street Market, along with other municipally run food halls,
was established by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1940 to get rid of
the pushcart culture he found so distasteful. For years preceding the
current real estate boom, the market languished. In 2001, vendors
occupied only 60 percent of the available space.
In the ’80s and ’90s, “it was very hard to get people inside,” said Ron
Budinas, who with his husband and partner, Ira Stolzenberg, has operated
Rainbo’s Fish in the market since the ’70s. “Things were dark and
dreary; there were prostitutes outside,” he added. “It was horrendous.”
“People were too busy playing numbers,” he told me, and certain stalls simply seemed like fronts for heroin dealing.
In recent years, as the fortunes of the Lower East Side have changed,
$22-a-pound cheese and smoked Scandinavian fish have come, and
surprisingly, this turn of events has not been odious. The market’s
bodegas and their unusual root vegetables have remained. Limes are still
sold at six for a dollar.
More than any other shopping venue in the city, the market stands as a
place where disparate demographics consume things together — where old
Hispanic women from the housing projects, owners of $2 million lofts and
artists in rent-controlled Ridge Street apartments coexist in a Jane Jacobs vision.
Is this utopian alchemy now doomed? In its new building, years away from
completion, the market will double in size to approximately 30,000
square feet. The city has promised existing vendors, from whom it has
sought suggestions, that rents will not exceed what they would be paying
in the current location; that they will remain in continuous operation
until the new structure is ready; that moving expenses will be taken
care of; and that infrastructure will be vastly improved.
At the same time, plans for Essex Crossing include a supermarket, which
could steer customers away and, as Mr. Budinas put it, “no one really
believes that rents won’t go up.”
But if the city can actually do what it claims it is so passionately
committed to doing and build on the social dynamic that has evolved at
the Essex Street Market for the whole project rather than displace it,
then in this instance development will finally mean what its proponents
always say it does: progress, and progress of the kind that uses private
financing to serve a greater good.
“You come here and it’s like Coney Island, like you’re going to join the circus,” Rhonda Kave, a chocolatier
in the market and a slow convert to the new venture, told me.
Quirkiness breeds affection and frustration in equal measure. “I’ll
mourn this building,” she said, “even as I curse that the
air-conditioning doesn’t work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/a-move-for-the-essex-street-market.html?_r=0
Published: September 27, 2013
Microeconomics: A City in Miniature
Randy
Hage started photographing New York storefronts in the late 1990s, on
visits from Los Angeles, and he fell in love with the stories they told:
the hand-painted signs in colors of undisguised optimism, the
inevitable rust and decay, the economic pressures exerted by the newer
shops creeping in. When he returned on subsequent visits, the stories
were often complete, the bodega replaced by an expensive restaurant, the
video store by a Duane Reade. “I’d talk to the store owners, and they’d
say they were glad there was less crime, but they also missed the old
people, and they were vexed by the rent increases that were pushing them
out, so they wouldn’t take advantage of the improvements.”
Mr. Hage, who builds models and props for movies and television, decided to arrest this history, at least on a small scale, by making painstakingly exact scale models of the storefronts he photographed. “It became a way of documenting the processes of gentrification and urban renewal,” he said. An exhibition of these dioramas, “Fleeting Moments,” will be at the Flower Pepper Gallery in Pasadena, Calif., from Oct. 5 to Nov. 15.
Mr. Hage was initially drawn to the ironwork of SoHo, but now he has to go to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, or farther to find streetscapes that speak to him. “I’ll go to Flatbush Avenue and walk from Prospect Park out to the end, because that’s what Manhattan used to be,” he said. “This show is about rekindling experiences of what it’s like to be in those neighborhoods, or bringing back a taste or a smell, those visceral recollections that mean so much to us.” He added a lament for the city today. “I think 7-Elevens are the bane of so many people’s neighborhoods,” he said.
Mr. Hage, who builds models and props for movies and television, decided to arrest this history, at least on a small scale, by making painstakingly exact scale models of the storefronts he photographed. “It became a way of documenting the processes of gentrification and urban renewal,” he said. An exhibition of these dioramas, “Fleeting Moments,” will be at the Flower Pepper Gallery in Pasadena, Calif., from Oct. 5 to Nov. 15.
Mr. Hage was initially drawn to the ironwork of SoHo, but now he has to go to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, or farther to find streetscapes that speak to him. “I’ll go to Flatbush Avenue and walk from Prospect Park out to the end, because that’s what Manhattan used to be,” he said. “This show is about rekindling experiences of what it’s like to be in those neighborhoods, or bringing back a taste or a smell, those visceral recollections that mean so much to us.” He added a lament for the city today. “I think 7-Elevens are the bane of so many people’s neighborhoods,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment