In the Dreamscape Of Chelsea Market (original) (raw)

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/08/garden/in-the-dreamscape-of-chelsea-market.html

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DESIGN NOTEBOOK

May 8, 1997

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May 8, 1997

Section C, Page

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IN a world where the generic is advertised as classic, and replication spells retail success, there is a certain gratification to be found in a place of raw exuberance whose strange outcroppings look as though they belong in a recently excavated cave.

The new Chelsea Market -- a cook's cosmopolis supplying the epicure in need with everything from lobsters to dairy-fresh milk in a series of deli-size storefronts inside the old Nabisco factory on Ninth Avenue at 16th Street -- has coined a style all its own.

Call it primordial chic. It probably will not inspire new collections by Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein. Its three-ton slabs of drill-scarred granite and blasted brick arches -- not to mention the belly-side views of squirming congo eels and African jumping frogs overhead at the elevators -- fairly scream, ''Don't try this at home.'' But the new market just might be idiosyncratic enough to earn a permanent spot on Manhattan's limited list of new public spaces worth gawking at.

The market's architect, Jeff J. Vandeberg, with a practice in SoHo, and the developer, Irwin Cohen, the president of A.T.C. Management Inc., have flown in the face of convention in a weirdly wonderful way.

Like icing on a cake, a red brick facade holds together an entire city block of 17 structures built between 1880 and 1930, and grouped helter-skelter around an elongated central court.

That something strange lurks within is apparent from the Ninth Avenue entrance, where an enormous swag of rusted iron links pinned with a gargantuan granite medallion is suspended over the scars in the brick where an old front was torn off. ''We wanted to leave all the footprints of everything we uncovered,'' Mr. Vandeberg said. ''If it looks like we blasted through the wall, we had to blast through the wall.''

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