Irwin Cohen, Who Turned a Factory Into Chelsea Market, Dies at 90 (original) (raw)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/realestate/commercial/irwin-cohen-dead.html
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He and his daughter transformed an abandoned Nabisco plant into a Manhattan destination for people who liked to cook, to eat and to gape.
Irwin Cohen in an undated photo. By developing a sprawling block into a food mecca, he helped transform the West Chelsea neighborhood and the nearby Meatpacking District.Credit...via Cohen family
Published Dec. 22, 2023Updated Dec. 23, 2023
Irwin Cohen, an inventive developer who transformed a derelict factory where the first Oreo cookie was produced in 1912 into Chelsea Market, an exuberant 21st-century food bazaar that helped revitalize its New York City neighborhood, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.
His son-in-law Blair Effron said he died of pneumonia in a hospital.
In creating the market, Mr. Cohen reconfigured the former National Biscuit Company plant — a complex of 17 brick buildings dating to the 1890s, filling a block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets — into an industrial-chic destination for foodies and a home for video production studios.
Repurposing the plant spurred the gentrification of West Chelsea. It also contributed to the conversion of the meatpacking district, to the market’s south, into a hotbed of trendy venues; helped secure the success of the High Line, a reimagining of an abandoned elevated railroad on the market’s west flank as a verdant, ribbonlike park; and set the stage for a proliferation of high-tech firms that rebranded the neighborhood as Silicon Alley.
Mr. Cohen recalled in a 2005 interview with the Center for an Urban Future that when he purchased the West Chelsea property in 1993, “you couldn’t walk here.”
“It was controlled by prostitutes 24 hours a day,” he said. “I looked at it, and I said that my goal was to have an 8-year-old child come here by public transportation, shop and go home, and his or her parents would feel safe. And that’s how it worked out.”
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An artist’s rendering of the National Biscuit Company plant when it was in operation.Credit...via Chelsea Market
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Repurposed as Chelsea Market, the former plant is now an exuberant 21st-century food bazaar.Credit...via Chelsea Market
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