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Monday, December 20, 2010

Things to do in NYC for the Holidays #5

If you happened to be in or around Chelsea and are looking for a place to eat, shop, or warm up- in a really cool part of New York History- look no further than Chelsea Market located at 75 9th Avenue (Between 15th and 16th Streets). Any time is a good time to visit, but specifically now as it is all dressed up for the Holidays.






This is made entirely of broken and used CD's, how's that for Eco-Friendly



History:

At the National Biscuit Company complex, begun in the 1890's in what is now west
 Chelsea, the ovens baked everything from Saltines to Oreos. Those ovens went
cold a half century ago, when the company moved out, but newer ovens have been
 working over the last decade in part of that old complex - at Chelsea Market,
from Ninth to 10th Avenue and 15th to 16th Street. A visit to the market offers
 ghostly evocations of the site's history.

In 1890, eight large eastern bakeries amalgamated to form the New York Biscuit
 Company and soon absorbed a dozen more firms. It was competing against another
 consortium, the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company in Chicago.

The New York Biscuit Company immediately began building a Romanesque-style
complex of six-story bakeries on the east side of 10th Avenue, running from 15th
to 16th Street, designed by Romeyn & Stever - some of these survive at midblock.
The rivalry was potentially ruinous, and in 1898 the two groups, along with
others, combined to form the National Biscuit Company, which soon provided half
 the biscuit production in the United States.

In late 1898, the new company brought out a new product, the Uneeda Biscuit,
 and it followed with many biscuits and cookies that are still familiar: Premium
 Saltines, Vanilla Wafers, Fig Newtons, Barnum's Animal Crackers (now Barnum's
Animals) and, in 1913, both the Oreo (originally Oreo Biscuit) and the Mallomar.

The company was painstaking about consistency, shelf life and packaging, and
used extensive advertising to establish a national market.

Within a few years of the merger, the bakery complex covered most of the block
back to Ninth Avenue, with elements like the series of orange brick structures
 at the northwest corner of 15th and Ninth. Designed by the staff architect for
 the company, Albert G. Zimmerman, these slightly classical structures were
built over the period 1905-12.

In 1913, Zimmerman designed the most prominent building in the complex, the
 11-story full-block structure from 10th to 11th Avenue and 15th to 16th Street.
 It was built on landfill - the timbers, chain and anchor of a two-masted
schooner were found during excavation.

National Biscuit also acquired outlying property, like the old American Can
 Company building at 447 West 14th Street. That structure extends through to
the south side of 15th Street, and National Biscuit erected a pedestrian bridge
 to join it with the main complex on the north side of 15th Street. Designed by
 a later company architect, James Torrance, it has a somewhat classical
character and looks to be made of lead-coated copper.

The company filed plans in 1926 for what would have been the centerpiece of its
 empire, a $3 million, 16-story bakery on the full block from 14th to 15th
Street and 10th to 11th Avenue, but that project did not go ahead.

In 1932, the architect Louis Wirsching Jr. replaced some of the 1890 bakeries on
 the east side of 10th Avenue with the present unusual structure, which
accommodates an elevated freight railroad viaduct. Its great open porch on the
 second and third floors was taken by the railroad as an easement for the rail
 tracks that still run through it.

Wirsching, by that time the staff architect for National Biscuit, presumably
 also designed the faceted, aluminum-covered Art Deco pedestrian bridge
connecting the two National Biscuit buildings facing each other across 10th
Avenue.

In the 1930's, a new generation of ovens - long, continuous "band ovens" - were
 remaking the baking industry, superseding the old vertical ovens. According to
 William Cahn's company history, "Out of the Cracker Barrel: The Nabisco Story
 from Animal Crackers to Zuzus" (Simon & Schuster, 1969) National Biscuit
installed some band ovens in the existing complex, but long horizontal
industrial processes adapted better to the low single-story buildings that were
 going up in outlying areas.

By 1958, National Biscuit was producing its line from a plant in Fair Lawn, N.J.
, and in 1959 it sold its New York complex - 22 structures, with 2 million
square feet - to the investor Louis J. Glickman. Telephone listings from the
1970's and 80's list no baking operations, only light industrial tenants, in an
 area that was sliding into a sort of Rust Belt-like graveyard.

In the 1990's, the investor Irwin B. Cohen organized a syndicate to buy the
 principal National Biscuit buildings, from Ninth to 11th Avenue and 15th to
16th Street. Over the next several years Mr. Cohen reinvented the older complex,
 between Ninth and 10th Avenue, re-renting the upper floors to an emerging group
 of technology companies.

On the ground floor, he and his designers, Vandeberg Architects, created a long
 interior arcade of food stores, now a well-known destination in west Chelsea -
 an area that itself is oven-hot these days, with million dollar lofts being
 created in the onetime leftover factory district. To walk through the Chelsea
Market is to stroll through a sort of postindustrial theme park, carefully
festooned with the detritus of a lost industrial culture, interspersed with food
 stores and restaurants.

The old factory floors weave and bob, and the central hall is a jumble of
disused ducts, an artificial waterfall, the original train shed, old signboards
 and other elements.

Mr. Cohen's group remade the 1913 building on the west side of 10th Avenue into
a regular office building, but the lobby is just as astonishing as Chelsea
Market's, an amalgam of old cast iron light poles, plate girders, portholes and
banks of television sets - it could be the Nautilus, Captain Nemo's submarine in
"20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

Fragments of the National Biscuit heritage are sprinkled all over the complex,
like the trim, elegant "NBC" monograms in the mosaics in the little entryways
along 15th Street. But the entrance to the 1913 building at 85 10th Avenue is
among the most haunting sights in New York.

Mr. Cohen says that when he first began work, he pulled off a 1960's mosaic
affixed to the entryway. But whoever had installed the work had chiseled off
the raised NBC letters, as well as the first inch or two of the surrounding
field of brick.

He says that, in keeping with the theme of industrial archaeology that runs
through his project, he wanted to showcase the damage, not conceal it, "to show
 New York that this was like the excavation of a mining site.


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