Preserving the preservatives. (Jamestown Properties)

For many neighbors of the Chelsea Market, the biggest concern over a massive addition to the market was the shape it would take and thus its impact on the High Line, which the market abuts. Love it or hate it, the High Line had become a major neighborhood amenity, one people did not want to see get any worse with a massive eight-story addition overhanging it.

Developer Jamestown Properties acceded to demands from the City Planning Commission—which oversaw the rezoning that helped preserve the High Line—to rejigger the building, so what kind of concessions could Council Speaker Christine Quinn possibly extract? Especially since she had reportedly waffled on whether or not to beat back the building entirely as she eyes crossing over to the other side of City Hall.

Well, what better way to appease NIMBYs and preservationists than with architectural protections and schools?

Today, the City Council's land-use committee voted in favor of the project, with the stipulation the Jamestown commit not to alter the historic former Nabsico factory below the addition, protecting both the original structure and the alterations made to it over the years to create the new market.

"There have been numerous calls in the neighborhood to save the Chelsea Market, and I agree that the historic nature and food focused market should be saved," Speaker Quinn said in a statement. "That is why the Council will vote today to preserve the iconic neighborhood treasure that is the Chelsea Market. In the original plan, there were no restrictions on what the developer could do to the unique and cherished ground floor retail space dominated by food vendors. The Council’s action permanently protects 75 percent of the current total interior ground floor concourse retail space for food-related uses."

Jamestown will also create a youth technology center within the market to provide education services in tech and media for local Chelsea kids, particularly those from two nearby housing projects.

And in a further paean to over development, the Department of City Planning has agreed to look at altering the zoning in other areas of the neighborhood to ensure appropriate development occurs. The focus will be on the area bounded by 11th and 12th Avenues and will also include 85 and 99 10th Avenue, the South side of West 15th street and the east side of 10th Avenue between 14th and 15th Street.

"At each step in the approval process, Jamestown has worked to improve the plan, and the changes made by Speaker Christine Quinn and the City Council strike a careful balance that offers benefits to the neighborhood and allows the project to proceed," Jamestown COO Michael Philips said.

Do the setback! (Studios Architecture)

The earlier 10th Avenue addition, sans setback. (Studios Architecture)

Much of the debate around the expansion of the Chelsea Market has centered around not the former Nasbisco factory turned popular shopping center (and subsequent tourist attraction), but the old railroad trestle next to it.

Part of the justification for expanding the market by 25 percent was that, in addition to providing construction jobs and new office space for the city's booming tech sector, the developer of the project, Jamestown Properties, would pay about $19 million to the High Line, to help fund ongoing maintenance. But there was also great community outcry over the fact that much of the new addition would be built on the 10th Avenue side of Chelsea Market, directly overhanging the High Line.

Earlier today, the City Planning Commission unanimously approved the project's expansion, and addressed a few of these concerns. The 10th Avenue addition will now be set back from the High Line, stepping back like a wedding cake as it rises, providing more air and light over the elevated park.

But the agreement was not a total victory for the Friends of the High Line, who are desperate for funds to keep the expensive park in shape. As a salve to community concerns about affordable housing, roughly one-third of the $19 million Jamestown had promised to the park will go instead into an affordable housing fund, which can be spent on projects in the neighborhood.

"We are gratified by the City Planning Commission's thoughtful and balanced approach in consideration and approval of Jamestown's application to expand the Chelsea Market," Michael Phillips, Jamestown's COO and project manager on the expansion, said in a statement. "With the leadership of Commission Chair Amanda Burden, the commission has modified the application to allow for some of the funds generated through a zoning bonus to be used for affordable housing, an approach that follows the road map set forth by the community board."

The board tentatively approved the project earlier this summer, raising questions about its size and a lack of affordable housing. They also fought against the possible inclusion of a hotel in an expansion planned over Budakkan on the Ninth Avenue side of the project, a concern echoed by Borough President Scott Stringer when he voted against the Chelsea Market expansion in July. He also lobbied for the project to be moved away from the High Line, though he preferred moving all of it to Ninth Avenue.

The Ninth Avenue addition, which had once been taller and included a hotel. (Studios Architecture)

As part of the agreement to win approval from the commission, Jamestown agreed to remove a hotel from its plans. It also reduced the height of the Ninth Avenue addition. That piece will now rise to 135 feet, even with the neighboring roofline of the market, rather than to a height of 160 feet.

As for the setbacks on 10th Avenue, they begin at the top of the market where the new addition is pushed back 15 feet, followed by another 10 feet when the new section reaches 185 feet, with a few more setbacks from there up to a final height of 230 feet. That is shorter than the neighboring Caledonia condo building though still taller than a number of the neighboring industrial buildings.

Altogether, the modifications reduce the expansion's overall size from 325,000 new square feet to roughly 285,000 square feet. The market currently contains about 1.2 million square feet of office and retail space.

"With these modifications, I believe this will be a great addition to the West Chelsea neighborhood," Commissioner Burden said before the commission voted unanimously to approve the project. "The additional office space will serve what has become a destination for creative and technology industries, and this new development will provide critical amenities to the High Line."

Despite the funding cut, Friends of the High Line also applauded the project's approval. "The City Planning Commission made a number of thoughtful changes to various aspects of the plan," Friends co-founder Robert Hammond said in an email. "We are pleased with the way the plan is moving forward, and we will continue to work with the community."

While polling has found general support for the expansion in the city, some locals still oppose the addition. "It's fiddling with the margins," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. "When you look at how much West Chelsea has been upzoned in the past 10 years, more than any other community, when you add to that an upzoning of one of New York City's most beloved landmarks, it just adds insult to injury."

He said the affordable housing contributions are "a sham" because, like a kitty set aside from the 2005 rezoning of the neighborhood, into which these new funds will also be deposited, none of the money has so far been spent. Though that is more a problem for the city than Jamestown.

He vowed to continue fighting the expansion at the City Council, where it will be taken up in the next two months ahead of its likely approval. The project lies in Council Speaker Christine Quinn's district, who has found herself stuck between addressing the concerns of her neighborhood base in Chelsea and the demands of the real estate industry, who appear to favor her as their candidate in next year's mayoral elections. How she threads the needle on this project will be interesting to see.

Market movers. (Flickr)

Last week, the Chelsea Market Coalition released a poll that found broad support across the city as well as on the West Side of Manhattan for a 300,000-square-foot addition to the office and retail complex on Ninth Avenue. Opponents of the plan just sent The Observer the following letter decrying the poll.

Our two organizations, Save Chelsea and the Council of Chelsea Block Associations [CCBA],
are responding to your recent article about a poll conducted to supposedly find out how people
feel about the Jamestown Properties development proposal for the Chelsea Market.Save Chelsea is a community based organization established to protect the residential character of Chelsea and the quality of life for the residents of our neighborhood. Our membership includes over 800 individual individuals and families.

The CCBA, established in 1961, is a coalition of the block associations active in the Chelsea area.

It is interesting to note, that the community being directly affected, Chelsea, did not have its poll results mentioned, because it was stated in your article, the sample was too small.

The residents in the other neighborhoods and areas of the city who answered the poll questions were not familiar with the history, concerns, and issues related to the Chelsea Market proposal. They were not present at the Community Board Public hearings during which the overwhelming majority of speakers voiced their opposition to the Chelsea Market. They did not hear the Community Board members themselvessay that the plan is bad, very bad, but because they felt stuck with it, because it was a done deal, they had to
approve it and hope for some changes.

The residents in the other neighborhoods apparently did not know that thousands of Chelsea residents signed petitions and wrote letters opposing the plan as being bad for our neighborhood.'

Your readers were not told that the developer, Jamestown Properties, has the opportunity to build in another community which wants and would welcome such a project, and that financial perks are available. Why not build in a community where you are wanted instead of where you are not wanted

And..........with regard to the point made about the jobs being provided, the jobs would still be provided, the workers would just be working at another location. We are not against unions and jobs.

Legitimate concerns have been raised about overdevelopment in Chelsea and the effects on our infrastructure. The High Line, which we supported, by its own words, now talks about having approximately three million visitors coming to visit it. The point being made is that the neighborhood is already saturated.

You should be aware that that our opposition to what we consider to be a bad plan,  a plan that is not needed,has nothing to do what some people say is a Not In My BackYard [NIMBY] position. Good devevelpment iswelcomed, bad and overdevelopment is not. Save Chelsea and the Council of Chelsea Block Associations has supported appropriate development and service programs for our community. We are not NIMBY organizations.

Mention is made about potential givebacks. Unfortunately as has occurred in other neighborhoods, the promiseof givebacks to a community don't always come to fruition.

However, a bad plan is a bad plan, and the offering of some changes and some givebacks does not make the plan a
a good one for the community and we do not want to be 'bought" to give our approval for the bad pllan.

As the saying goes, "there is more than meets the eye" and unfortunately, those who answered the flawed poll
descibed in the article your paper published, did not have all the information, and were not asked the appropriate
questions.

We trust that our response will be published in your newspaper.

Thank you.

Bill Borock, President
Council of Chelsea Block Associations

Lesley Doyel and Justin Hoy, Co-Presidents
Save Chelsea

What do you think? (Jamestown Properties)

The expansion of the Chelsea Market has drawn skepticism from some of the city’s most pro-development quarters, most notably City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, who considers the neighboring High Line one of her hallmark achievements, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, caught between the concerns of her constituents and her boosters in the business community. Both have very powerful sway over the 500,00-square-foot project through the city’s public land-use review process, currently underway.

As for the rest of New York? They seem to like the plan, at least according to a new poll commissioned by supporters of the expansion.

Of the 600 New Yorkers surveyed in all five boroughs on behalf of the Chelsea Market Coalition, roughly half supported the project, with that number growing to 8 out of 10 when given a short description of the expansion, which includes roughly 300,000 square feet within two additions to the popular office and retail hub. What is most surprising about the results is that support among Manhattanites, including those living on the West Side of the island, paralleled or even outpaced support from the rest of the city.

Of Manhattan residents, 49 percent supported the project before they learned about it and 15 percent opposed it, while 77 percent supported it after learning about the project. For West Siders, the numbers were 50 percent for before being apprised of the plans and 10 percent opposed, while were in favor 78 percent for after.

This is contrary to the prevailing beliefs that the community largely opposes the project, augured by protests and opposition from the community board, which gave its conditional approval to the project, but only after a contentious vote tied to the promise of affordable housing. Borough President Scott Stringer also voted against the expansion, though he, like the community board, would support the project if it were moved away from the High Line, along with other concessions.

"This project is strongly supported by New Yorkers, and we look forward to its approval later this year," Tony Juliano, chairman of the Greenwich Village-Chelsea Chamber of Commerce, a member of the Chelsea Market Coalition, said in an email.

Currently, Jamestown Properties wants to add an eight-story, 240,000-square-foot office tower on top of the 10th Avenue side of the building overlooking the High Line and a smaller L-shaped 90,000-sqaure-foot Tetris-y addition perched atop Budakkan on Ninth Avenue. The former Nabisco factory measures 1.2 million square feet, so this would increase its size by about a quarter.

While many New Yorkers may support the project, they are largely ignorant of it. According to the poll, only 1 in 5 of the 600 registered voters surveyed by Global Strategy Group had heard about the project while 1 in 3 on the West Side knew of the expansion plans. The latter group is defined as residents living between the Battery and 155th Street. The opinions of Chelsea residents, the group most directly impacted by the project, could not be gauged because that sample would have been too small to draw statistical conclusions from.

The biggest reason for supporting the project was on economic grounds, with 80 percent of voters approving of the 5,000 jobs the project is said to facilitate while 65 percent said they strongly support the plan on these grounds. ”With unemployment in New York City hitting 10%, New York City residents want
government leaders to foster, not frustrate, job-creating private development," Mr. Juliano said.

Still, New Yorkers wanted to balance this economic growth with the needs of the neighborhood, but their concerns of over-development were somewhat muted. Only one-third of New Yorkers polled said overcrowding and congestion would be an issue with the plan while one-quarter of West Siders said this could be a problem.

An education program to teach high school students tech skills that Jamestown has promised also drew favor for the project, some 80 percent. The fact that the new office space is expected to be filled by tech firms also seemed to boost the project, with 60 percent of New Yorkers polled said that was a convincing reason to support the project (only 50 percent said they supported it because the Coalition supported it.)

The one question the poll did not directly address, and the one that seems to concern many locals, as well as the likes of Ms. Burden, is the location of much of the expansion directly over the High Line. There was also no mention of a hotel as part of the Ninth Avenue expansion, but that is because the inclusion of a hotel has been officially abandoned by Jamestown, according to a spokesman for the developer. In fact, this concession, along with the education program and possible creation of affordable housing were used as examples of Jamestown's willingness to make concessions to the community.

Mayoral candidates may want to take note. While the vast majority of New Yorkers (57 percent) and West Siders (54 percent) polled said the project would play no role in who they support in next year's elections, 31 percent of New Yorkers and West Siders said it could sway them compared to 7 percent of New Yorkers and 10 percent of West Siders who said they might vote against supporters of the Chelsea Market expansion.

Locals, whose exact opinions are difficult to glean from the broad focus of the poll, remain unconvinced. "You walk the streets with a 'Save Chelsea Market' pin and people stop you and say, 'What do you mean? Oh my god!' the reaction is just so strong to this," Lesley Doyel, co-chair of the Save Chelsea coalition, said in a phone interview. "I don't know anyone who likes this." Though, as the poll indicates, it also seems like many of them had no idea the project was happening.

"This is not at all a NIMBY situation because we are not opposed to development, there has been so much of it in recent years, and much of it good, but at a certain point, you have to say enough," she said. "I don't want to say Disneyland, but that is how it is beginning to feel, we are so overcrowded."

Ms. Doyel called the poll flawed because it was furnished for by a group supporting the plan, and points to a previous poll of the community that she had worked to debunk. "This is an effort by the developer—it's a paid pollster, and they're getting the results they're paid to get."

A proposed 11-story hotel, which the borough president wants replaced with a bigger office building, freeing up space over the High Line.

One local architect has made the case for the move. (Architakes)

A proposed expansion of the Chelsea Market is as big as some of its neighbors. Does that make it acceptable?

Jamestown Properties wants to add an eight-story addition onto the western end of the former Nabisco factory, which already is seven stories tall and encircles the High Line. Jamestown argues it should be allowed to match its taller neighbors, sating demand for techie office space. Locals counter that to do so would rob the High Line of the light and air and views that help make it more than a glorified Midtown sidewalk.

Borough President Scott Stringer has decided to side with them, voting against Jamestown’s proposal to expand. Among the recommendations he made yesterday to the City Planning Commission is that the bulk of the project should be shifted to the Ninth Avenue section of the building, where Jamestown has already proposed adding a hotel above Buddakkan—another feature Mr. Stringer wants eliminated.

"I do think there's merit to the proposal, behind tech jobs and bolstering start-ups and recognizing that Chelsea has become a small-business development hub, that's a worthy project," Mr. Stringer told The Observer. "But there's a lot of moving parts to a development of that size, and going back to the rezoning of 2005, making sure the High Line was not surrounded by large-scale developments was something the City Planning Commission thought was very smart."

"This goes against existing policy that was put in place," he added, "so it makes sense to have a policy discussion about what is appropriate and what is possible."

Jamestown has argued in the past that it cannot shift the bulk of the building east because of the composition of the Chelsea Market. Actually composed of 17 separate structures built over the course of half a century, it is a complex complex. Adding a structure to the eastern end would require punching holes through existing work space, whereas the western end has a more robust structure (it was built in 1932 to accommodate the arrival of the High Line) as well as unused elevator shafts and similar ancillary space that could make room.

"The expansion will be achieved without relocating existing tenants or any public subsidy, and will in fact generate some $7 million of new tax revenue annually as well as nearly $20 million to benefit the High Line," Jamestown spokesman Lee Silberstein said in a statement.

Jamestown also argues adding on to the western end keeps it from overhanging the courtyard that lets light into the popular retail space below. The company has also questioned whether this would not require it to start from scratch on its land-use application, which would almost certainly never happen.

Borough President Stringer believes it is within the scope application, and underscores the community's discomfort with the project. "These are all important questions we should be looking at," he said. "I think the options need to be fleshed out."

The proposal is not unlike one made by local architect and activist David Holowka on his Architakes blog (also pictured above).

It is likely this proposal could be explored in some form when the project goes before the City Planning Commission in the next two months. Unlike Borough President Stringer, whose role is advisory, the commission's recommendations will be binding.

In addition to moving the office addition and eliminating the hotel, Mr. Stringer wants the height of the building reduced from 230 feet to 184 feet. He also wants Jamestown to set aside money for affordable housing, a provision the developer told the local community board in the spring it would consider.

There is an obvious political dimension to the project, as well, as it lies in the district of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who, like Mr. Stringer, is running for mayor. Should the speaker side with the developer, the borough president could paint her as a big business crony, should she vote against it, he can claim she is following her lead.

Mr. Stringer insists this is all about creating a better plan.

"What's the point of having the High line if you're going to surround it with huge out of context buildings, destroying the High Line," he said. "It goes against the public purpose of the park."

Nabisco's old Chelsea plant, before the High Line showed up in the early 1930s.

Walking the High Line can be maddening and miraculous, often all at once. The crowds, the new buildings crowding out the views of the Hudson, all atop a highly manicured railroad trestle. Some park.

Yet it remains one of the best places to take in the city and its people—a big part of the reason the park attracts 3 million visitors a year, 10 times the original estimate, and has generated more than $2 billion in economic development.

The project could be considered one of the most successful real estate initiatives since Park Avenue was built by the Grand Central Railroad. And some day, probably sooner than most people realize, walking the High Line will be not unlike strolling down Park Avenue, with a wall of buildings on either side. And still, it will be the city’s new premier address.

Into this renaissance lumbers the Chelsea Market, the project that in many ways made this transformation possible when it opened two decades ago. Now it wants its share of the action, just like everybody else, planting itself on the High Line.

Already the old Nabisco factory looms over the park, as it has since the railroad was first raised in 1932, an early warning of all the development that would someday follow. Now Jamestown Properties, the Atlanta-based firm that has been involved in the building since 2004, wants to double this end of the red-brick behemoth, adding an eight-story addition on the old factory. “It’s not a fully completed asset,” a company executive told The Wall Street Journal in March of last year, when the project was announced.

The decision has terrified the neighbors, many of whom love to hate the High Line and hate to love the market, with all their crowds and commerce. But they have forged an unusual alliance to try and save both—even as they largely ignore the history of a building, and a neighborhood, that has been constantly changing to suit the needs of its masters.

The controversial 10th Avenue addition.

The building today, seen from the High Line.

Five years after the Chelsea Hotel was built, lending its name to what was then becoming a popular Gilded Age neighborhood for the city’s industrious class, the first New York Biscuit Company building began to take shape eight blocks south and one block west, in 1890.

From a series of red-brick bakeries rising six stories, New York Biscuit began to churn out the most famous sweet and savory crisps in the country. Eight years after the facilities opened, the competitors merged to form the National Biscuit Company, since known as Nabisco, and never looked back. By the 1920s, more than 22 buildings covering some 2 million square feet had been built.

The booming industry was good for business but bad for the neighborhood. The 10th Avenue freight line, the lifeblood of the neighborhood, was claiming ever more lives, so the decision was made to elevate it.

Louis Wirsching Jr., Nabisco’s chief architect at the time, came up with the turreted structure that still stands along 10th Avenue, operating from 1932 until Nabisco shipped out for suburban North Jersey in 1958.

The next year, the building was sold to Louis Glickman, a storied, bootstrapping developer who once threatened to tear down Carnegie Hall in favor of a new office building. He never did much with the old factory, nor did a succession of other owners.

In 1993, Irwin Cohen arrived, along with a group of Russian and Tajik backers, met through a friend who was an immigration attorney. They had $10 million in hand, all it took to buy an industrial building in the area back then. A former lawyer, Mr. Cohen had been doing a brisk business in renting up similar structures in Long Island City. “I like this type of building,” he said over a lunch of steamed vegetables last Friday at Sardi’s. “I couldn’t tell you why else I bought it.”

At the time, he had been working with City Hall on a plan to relocate the Flower district into new facilities, keeping it from moving to New Jersey. He thought the Nabisco plant, bought at auction, would be a good place. But the parking never worked out, so he had to figure on something different. A subsequent deal with the photography store B&H also fell through.

“And then I said, what can you do?” he recalled. “New York is food, clothing and shelter. We had lots of clothing in Long Island City, so I said, ‘Let’s do food.’”

Food was not such a wild idea, as the area was still very much the Meatpacking district, the cobblestones running red with blood. “When we first got in the building, we found three dead bodies, all on their knees, shot through the head, execution style,” Mr. Cohen said. He recalled having to devise clever ways to drive out the prostitutes who had overtaken the place.

His great innovation was requiring the wholesalers who took up in the building to also sell retail, creating the famous martketplace in the old factory’s concourse everyone now knows so well. It now attracts 300,000 visitors a year—the same number the High Line thought it would be getting. Amy’s Bread, the Lobster Place, Buon Italia, all helped attract companies to move their offices upstairs, starting with Oxygen, MLB.com and the Food Network, whose hosts regularly shopped downstairs during their shows early days. ABC’s Murder One and HBO’s Oz were among the shows shot in the vacant corners of the building, since transformed into office space.

Thus Jamestown’s desire to expand. Between the full occupancy here, and the success of Google in attracting yet more tech talent to the neighborhood, to say nothing of the fiber-optic infrastructure below ground that the techies obsess over, this has quietly emerged as one of the city’s premier office locations.

“We easily have 350,000 square feet of need now,” Michael Phillips, Jamestown’s COO, told The Commercial Observer in March. “We can’t just go to the vacant lot down the street and build a new building, because the infrastructure, the cooling tower, the electrical vaults, the recording studios, the servers are all up in this building.” (Mr. Phillips and his associates declined to comment for this article due to ongoing negotiations with the city over the building’s rezoning.)

The proposed hotel on Ninth Avenue.

The hotel will be built, Tetris-like, around the existing building.

But the idea of Chelsea becoming an office district is precisely what repels many locals. “This is not Times Square,” said David Holowka, an architect, longtime resident and member of the Save Chelsea coalition. He has drawn up proposals of his own, on his blog Archi-Takes, that proposes Jamestown move the bulk of its development to Ninth Avenue, where it would not overhang the High Line. He argues that the move is a baldfaced attempt to plunk down a new office building, with choice views up and down the city’s hottest new attraction.

Jamestown has said that this would destroy the interior space of the building, which everyone loves so much, and the structure on the western end is all that could accommodate the expansion. They already have plans for a nine-story hotel above the Buddakkan space on Ninth Avenue, that this would interfere with, though the developer told the community board in April it would abandon the hotel if asked—though it would still build all the space, a total of 330,000 square feet on both ends on top of the 1.2 million that already exists. This is half the size of the Googleplex (which Jamestown sold to the company for a record $1.8 billion), but also bigger than just about anything else in this corner of town.

“They’re really just trying to maximize their profits, aren’t they?” said Jeff Vandenburg, Mr. Cohen’s architect on the original Chelsea Market. He worked on a similar proposal to add onto the building in the middle of last decade, but he pointed out that his stepped down toward the High Line to minimize impacts. “Money finally wins out, and these things get as bulky as possible,” Mr. Vandenburg said. “It’s always bulkamania. It’s always bulkamania.”

The big issue for a lot of locals is whether or not the community actually benefits from this proposal. More office workers may be good for the city’s tech sector and overall economy, but what does Chelsea get out of this? Furthermore, the Chelsea Market was intentionally carved out of the rezoning that led buildings to skyrocket around the High Line. Now that it is being allowed to grow, there are fears other developers will make the same requests. “Cohen asked for it, and we fought him tooth and nail,” said Ed Kirkland, former chair of the preservation committee at the community board and one of the authors of the rezoning. “At least he was a local guy. Jamestown is just going to take their money back to Atlanta.”

There is a certain irony that people who bemoan the High Line at home, and profess to rarely visit it, are now fighting for its salvation from shadows and overdevelopment. Remember the park’s Martin Luther moment, when an anonymous neighbor posted a screed throughout the area concluding, “If you see an empty space, leave it empty. Otherwise there will be no spaces for New Yorkers.” Jamestown has not taken heed, and its main excuse for building is supporting the park: it will pay $19 million to help fund the ongoing maintenance, money Friends of the High Line, a booster for the project, is desperate for.

“The High Line may not be for us, but neither are these new buildings,” Mr. Kirkland said.

Architect Gregg Pasquarelli knows a thing or two about additions on top of Chelsea buildings. His SHoP Architects, better known for the Barclays Center and East River Esplanade, designed the Porter House across the street from the market. It happens to be one of the firm’s first successes, the dark metal box with the vertical lights running through it, perched atop the yellow-brick Old Homestead Steakhouse.

Mr. Pasquarelli has called it home since it opened a decade ago, and he said he welcomes his new neighbor, even if it will block his view.

“What’s wrong with congestion?” he asks. “I’m all for congestion, it’s the lifeblood of the city. The neighborhood can handle the density.”

This is the way New York, Chelsea, Nabisco, has always been developing. The city, Google, needs the space, needs the money. There is nowhere else to go but up. A development promise has been undone. It is not the first time, and it will not be the last. At least this is taking place atop an already big building in an already crowded district.

“I just wish they had been a little more ambitious with their design,” Mr. Pasquarelli said. “It’s fairly suburban.”

Chelsea Market (Photo from Curbed)

The battle to expand Chelsea Market has once again come to a head—a giant glassy head.  Neighborhood residents are none too pleased with Jamestown Properties' plans, which call for 250,000 square feet of office space to be added to the existing Ninth Avenue structure and the construction of a neighboring twelve-story hotel.

Among the latest complaints, according to Crain's, neighbors are questioning whether Jamestown Properties will really deliver on their promise to bring 1,200 new jobs to the area with their new development, and complaining that the mammoth project threatens Chelsea Market's historical integrity. We have to admit, the post-modern glass addition is pretty heinous, making the building look like a precarious block tower.

Needless to say, Jamestown Properties has not taken the attacks sitting down. The German-based company has drafted a petition, presenting it to Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who represents the area, and other city pols. "We're just creating a platform for community residents who support the project to be heard,” a company spokesperson told Crain's.

Who exactly supports the plan? Apparently people who like the High Line: according to the deal in place, if the construction on Chelsea Market is allowed to go forth as planned, Jamestown Properties would be required to gift the city $17 million to enhance the elevated park.

Is it worth it? Really? Take at look at that picture one more time.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Chelsea Morning (Photo: wallyg via flickr).

CB Richard Ellis’ Capital Markets Group has secured a $380 million loan for the recapitalization of Chelsea Market, the mixed-use property at 75 Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, brokers told The Commercial Observer.

The deal was negotiated on behalf of Jamestown, the owner of Chelsea Market, a 1.18 million-square-feet cluster of 15 buildings that houses companies like Time Warner, Major League Baseball and the Food Network. At closing, the occupancy of the property was at 99 percent.

Jeff Ackemann, Will Yowell, Justin Parsonnet, Jay O’Meara and Steve O’Brien of CB Richard Ellis represented Jamestown and arranged financing from Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg, a German-based bank. “

Jamestown was extremely satisfied with the debt execution,” said Shak Presswala, a vice president and head of capital markets at Jamestown, in a statement last week. “CBRE compiled the best experts to complete the transaction successfully. The execution was smooth and the debt was a perfect match for our business plan.”

jsederstrom@observer.com

Jamestown's plan would stack two new multi-story spaces on top of the complex. Above the 10^th Avenue side, the company would add an eight-story glass office building; and a 12-story boutique hotel would sit atop the east side of the complex. The proposal to build these structures--which, admittedly, may be of dubious aesthetic appeal--has become a subject of outrage for longtime residents who have witnessed the Chelsea Market building's transformation from old industrial complex to developed neighborhood hot spot over the past two decades.

The real estate company seems surprised at the backlash (the Times reported yesterday that Jamestown has been "taken aback by the uproar"), but may have allies in nonprofit group Friends of the High Line. To build the plan's structures, the company would have to obtain a zoning variance that would also require them to contribute roughly $17 million to help fund improvements to the High Line project.

Chelsea Market isn't a designated landmark, but the plan will still have to go through reviews by the community board and the City Planning Department. Given Manhattan's boundaries, vertical expansion in the neighborhood is inevitable--it's just a question of whether economic function or aesthetic appeal will win out in this particular battle.

asterling@observer.com 

The juice bar was a spare operation, offering premade juices, Thai lettuce wraps and chocolate chip cookies shaped like hearts (none heated above 118 degrees, “to preserve vital enzymes and nutrients,” advised the menu), all imported from the kitchen of Ms. Melngailis’s raw-food restaurant, Pure Food & Wine, on Irving Place. The proprietress’s image—sassy, blond, youthful—gazed down serenely from her latest cookbook, Living Raw Food, which was stacked behind the register. “Get the Glow,” promised its cover. Ms. Melngailis’ fetching visage also appears on her e-commerce site, oneluckyduck.com (in one shot, she seems to cuddle up to a bundle of cilantro), where she sells her own branded packaged snacks and blogs under the headline “Sarma Raw.”

But today, she was slumped at a table over her laptop in a ponytail, Phish baseball hat and a long-sleeved T-shirt that said “Pennsylvania Wrestling.” She’d been up until 5 a.m. writing important emails pertaining to this long-planned expansion of her raw-food empire and hadn’t even had time to wash her hair. In person, Ms. Melngailis, who is 37, can be guarded, serious and prone to long pauses while she formulates the right thought; her measured affect contrasts with the raw-food pinup image she projects on her cookbooks. She is fiercely protective of her brand, having wrestled Pure Food from the grip of Matthew Kenney, her co-founder and onetime boyfriend, in the aftermath of their public and acrimonious split four years ago. “We need more stuff in here,” she said, professing dismay at the lack of homey touches (framed pictures of ducks, a selection of organic cosmetics) that make the original One Lucky Duck juice bar, adjacent to the restaurant on 17th Street, appealing to the clientele of models constantly folded into its chairs. She felt the new space had opened before it was really ready.

A little over a week later, a visitor to Chelsea Market noticed there was even less stuff in Ms. Melngailis’ shop; in fact, there was none. “I ended up going there at night and pulling all my product and staff out, ninja style,” Ms. Melngailis said, reached by phone. She had had a kerfuffle with an investor she preferred not to name (though she did provide The Observer with his cell-phone number, calls to which were not returned). “They had more control, technically,” said Ms. Melngailis, “And I didn’t think that it was going to be the sort of control where things plow forward, and I’m sort of steamrolled over in terms of saying, ‘Wait a minute, this needs to be this way and this needs to be this way.’” Ms. Melngailis said she “felt like I was being pushed into this role of bobble-head promoter.”

IN FACT, she is a serious businesswoman who wants to bring her brand of “accessible, high-quality,” oven-free eating to the masses via a series of juice-bar takeaways in several different cities (she compared her model to Le Pain Quotidien’s). Last summer, Ms. Melngailis paved the way for this expansion by purchasing Pure Food from its original investor, Jeffrey Chodorow, and establishing an umbrella company, One Lucky Duck, LLC, owned wholly by her. She also enlisted a new investor to finance the juice-bar expansion: first in Chelsea Market, and then, if all went well, elsewhere in Manhattan and other cities. Luckily, as the larger deal hinged on the success of the Chelsea Market location, no paperwork had yet been signed; Ms. Melngailis said that to her knowledge, her investor is stuck with the lease. A representative for Chelsea Market refused to comment on the current tenant or future plans for the space, which now sits empty.

A former banker at Bear Sterns who admits to not knowing her way around Brooklyn, Ms. Melngailis is proud of the high-end, “sexy” sheen she’s put on her brand of crunch. If raw food has in the years since Pure Food’s opening ceded media ink to trends like locavorism and artisanal butchery, which she sees as complementary (Ms. Melngailis herself admits to eating fish regularly until reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent book, Eating Animals), Pure Food soldiers on, weathering a recession that has flattened more formidable enterprises, serving pricey sake drinks, zucchini lasagna and cashew-based ice creams to loyal fans like Gisele Bündchen and Woody Harrelson. (According to Page Six, Owen Wilson, a regular and a friend of Ms. Melngailis’, recently skipped the line at One Lucky Duck and wandered right into the kitchen.) When Ms. Melngailis first met Mr. Kenney, in 2003, she was a finance refugee and dedicated carnivore just out of culinary school whom he’d hired as a researcher on one of his cookbooks. He was at the time a troubled culinary superstar, beginning to close a string of New York restaurants for financial reasons. During a “grim” summer when he had no working businesses, the couple were beginning to work on a concept for an upscale burger bar (“Back then, it would have been new!” said Ms. Melngailis) when they happened upon raw food at the café Quintessence. There they struck up a conversation with a pretty girl eating alone, who told them, “I wish someone would open a cool raw-food restaurant.”

IT WAS A light-bulb moment for Ms. Melngailis, who with Mr. Kenney repaired to Maine, where they vacationed in the summers, to experiment with a raw-food diet. “I just felt like a fog had been lifted from my head, which is a really nice feeling,” she said. Mr. Chodorow came on board as a backer in what he explained recently was a conciliatory gesture after he had tried—and failed—to buy Mr. Kenney’s leasehold at Commune, on 20th Street, and wound up circumventing him to get the lease directly from the landlord. “I’d done some reading, and I thought, ‘Oh, very interesting,’ not for my lifestyle, but they were both on it and they felt great,” Mr. Chodorow said. He saw no signs of potential strife between the two. “They’d come in for a meeting and she’d have her little sneakers on that on the back said, ‘I love Matthew!’” he remembered. When they did split, he sided with Ms. Melngailis. “I thought she was fully capable culinarily, and she had the business background,” Mr. Chodorow said. “He had a lot of unsuccessful business ventures.” (Mr. Chodorow later sued Mr. Kenney for poaching staff from Pure Food for a restaurant he subsequently opened, Heirloom, which has since closed.)

Reached by email, Mr. Kenney said he was out of the country and unavailable for comment. “On a side note, I’m sure Jeffrey and I in fact do not remember things the same way,” he added.

A tabloid battle ensued, with Mr. Kenney accusing Ms. Melngailis of having an affair with one of the restaurant’s managers and of subjecting him to physical abuse, and Ms. Melngailis countering with statements like “he is reminding me of David Gest.”

“He was very clever in that everything he claimed was technically true, but was generally exaggerated so it came out sounding really dramatic, like the assault charge he filed,” said Ms. Melngailis (now cohabiting happily across the street from Pure Food with a musician who once worked in her juice bar). “Yes, I threw grapefruits at him, but I think that’s funny!”

WORSE THAN THE tabloid drama was the debt Ms. Melngailis said Mr. Kenney saddled her with after she invested in some of his failed ventures. “When I met him, I had a lot of money,” she said. “Within two years, I was in debt by the same amount, more actually. That’s a burden I’ve been carrying around for seven years now. It’s exhausting. And debilitating. It really sucks, actually. And most people have no idea, so it feels sort of lonely carrying around. Meanwhile, I’ve been building One Lucky Duck all this time with little to no investment capital, but it’s what I’m meant to do, and at some point the debt will be gone. It’s like playing a game with a big handicap. It gets in the way, but I can still win.”

“I want to build a really big business,” Ms. Melngailis said. Still: “This not a Jamba Juice—it’s a much more careful and personal kind of thing.” She admitted she’d been approached many times to do television, but “my goal isn’t to be a TV person,” she said. “I’m a little camera-shy.” She views herself as more Richard Branson than Martha Stewart: brand mastermind, not the brand itself. In addition to the juice bar and takeaways, she’s mulling a high-end dessert shop where she’d sell Pure Food’s popular array of ice creams, and a new headquarters for oneluckyduck.com, which she said does about half a million dollars in sales each year and is highly “scalable.” She’s also had meetings about a possible Pure Food outpost in Japan.

The deal for the series of juice bars and takeaways would have been a big break, but, speaking by phone several days after pulling out, Ms. Melngailis said her only regret was that “it looks like I went in there and tried to do it and it didn’t work. That place could have been awesome!” She hinted, in fact, that should her former investor give up the space, she’d be thrilled to scrounge up the money to return to Chelsea Market on her own. “What I don’t want to do is let anyone else take control.”

mbryan@observer.com