Scary Stories

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

Chelsea Marketing: Expansion Fits With Beloved Building’s Past, But What About Chelsea’s Future?

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. Read More

The Chelsea Marketeer Sets His Sights on SoBro

The developer who brought Chelsea Market to Manhattan now wants to replicate it in the South Bronx.

Irwin Cohen, who introduced Manhattan to the concept of “food purveyors,” is floating a plan to build a new home for 16 ethnic food merchants who are about to get kicked out of the Bronx Terminal Market. Read More