Google this: What half-empty, bullet-riddled West Side building sold for under $10 million less than 25 years ago and is worth over $2 billion today?
Answer: Chelsea Market at 75 Ninth Ave., which Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is buying for $2.4 billion from real estate company Jamestown. How the once-decrepit and dangerous former cookie factory — where Oreos and Mallomars were born — blossomed into one of the world’s Cinderella addresses is a stirring tale of Manhattan’s rebound from the “bad old days.”
It also celebrates the vision of former Chelsea Market owner Irwin Cohen. Clever developer Cohen, 84, hasn’t been involved there for about eight years. But his bold brainstorm to create a food hall in the crime-ridden 1990s put the obsolete-seeming hulk on the map for creative companies seeking a cheaper part of town. (“Chelsea Market” also includes the 1.2 million-square-foot, horizontal office building on top of the food hall.)
Chelsea Market spearheaded a vast neighborhood transformation. It prompted majority partner Jamestown and major New York landlord Taconic to buy massive but rotting 111 Eighth Ave. to the east in 1998 and set the stage for Google. It encouraged Cohen to buy underused 85 Tenth Ave. to the west in 2003.
Today, the trio forms a new “Alphabet City.” Alphabet now also owns 111 Eighth and is the biggest tenant at 85 Tenth. Three buildings worth peanuts in the 1990s are valued at a combined nearly $5 billion. Erected during the time of steam trains and smoke-belching factories, they now herald Manhattan’s embrace of the digital age.
And it all started with a fruit stand.
When Cohen and “a few Russian guys in the aluminum business” bought the foreclosed mortgage on 75 Ninth Ave. in 1993, the looming hulk astride the crumbling High Line trestle had “some manufacturing tenants and a lot of vacant space. There were gangland murders in the basement,” Cohen recalls today. “Three people were shot in their knees with their hands tied behind them.
“There was a rent strike right after I took over,” he laughed. “The streets were controlled by prostitutes.”
Dan Barteluce, founder of Chelsea Market’s Wine Vault, told Eater.com recently, “They were still hosing the street with carcasses and blood” from the Meatpacking zone one block south.
The squalor belied 75 Ninth Ave.’s proud past. The address — which comprises 17 interlocked buildings — was originally home to the National Biscuit Co., aka Nabisco. High Line tracks passed through the second floor, where freight trains dropped off flour and other staples to be transformed into Oreos, Mallomars and Uneeda Biscuits.
“To get a trademark, you had to establish interstate trade,” Cohen told The Post. “So they mailed a tin of these Oreo cookies, which then used lard to hold the crackers together, to one of their offices in New Jersey.”
After Nabisco moved to the suburbs in 1959, 75 Ninth declined into a bottom-grade warehouse and manufacturing facility. Cohen had a fresh idea: a ground-floor food hall for local merchants — no chains allowed.
“I wanted to create an environment that would bring office tenants to upper floors,” he said.
Long before the trestle was turned into a public park, Cohen faced a grittier reality: “I had to make the neighborhood comfortable for people to come, so that an 8-year-old could shop at the market and go home in safety.”
But Cohen had no idea how to launch a gourmet food hall, so he walked around the mean streets of West Chelsea and the Meatpacking District.
“Manhattan Fruit Exchange was my first tenant,” he said. At the time, it was only a wholesaler a few blocks away. “I convinced him to go into retail. He said he’d never done that. I said, ‘Neither did I — let’s learn together.’ ”
Soon after, Union Square Cafe owner Danny Meyer “came through on a tour when we were building the market,” Cohen recalled. “He said we needed a baker. He introduced me to Amy Scherber, who brought in Amy’s Bread.”
Cohen displayed vintage Nabisco photos and artifacts around the market. Among them: the 1912 letter certifying receipt of the first “interstate” Oreo delivery. But Cohen’s and architect Jeff Vandeberg’s shrewdest stroke to evoke the industrial past was to install a water-spewing ceiling pipe in the middle of the brick-and-concrete, 800-foot-long selling floor. Water tumbling into a pool was a novelty in 1997 and is marketgoers’ favorite selfie spot today.
Foodies flocked to the edgy location. The New York Times’ Eric Asimov praised Tracy Macari’s grilled chicken cutlets “coated in a lively spice rub” with a “warm, smoky kick from chipotle and ancho chilies” — as scarce at the time as a clean Ninth Avenue sidewalk.
Suddenly sexy, 75 Ninth Ave. appealed to creative companies seeking cheaper office and studio space. Cohen landed the Food Network, cable channel NY1, Oxygen Media and MLB for the upper floors.
The pioneering spirit spurred a craving for bricks and mortar. In 1998, major landlord Taconic and partners bought 111 Eighth Ave. They spent tens of millions of dollars to modernize the former warehouse and exploit the fiber-optic cable network that runs beneath it. Soon came tenants Bank of New York, Nike USA, ad agency Deutsch, Verizon and Sprint.
Even so, Tenth Avenue was still “very dangerous even to park your car,” recalled Cohen, who later sold his stake in 75 Ninth to Jamestown, which invested heavily in it and expanded the market to a lower level. Cohen had briefly owned 85 Tenth Ave., a second former Nabisco plant across the avenue, in the 1990s. But it didn’t take off until Cohen bought it back for $57 million in 2003 with partners Angelo Gordon Co. and Belvedere Capital.
Its sidewalk was still mostly lifeless. Cohen’s masterstroke was to entice Mario Batali and Joe and Lidia Bastianich to launch Del Posto inside one of 85 Tenth’s dark storefronts. As The Post said at the time, luring a world-famous chef turned “a class-C office building into an integral part” of the neighborhood’s mushrooming “creative/media/dining scene.”
Cohen also brought in Tom Colicchio’s glamorous Craftsteak. Marquee office tenants again followed. Two years later, Google made its first move into the neighborhood when it signed for 150,000 square feet at 111 Eighth Ave.
But Del Posto nearly got booted after Cohen’s group resold 85 Tenth in August 2005 for $294 million to Somerset Partners. One month after it opened in December 2005, the new landlord tried to evict it over dubious “lease violations” — including allegedly illegal use of basement space.
Joe Bastianich wrote in his 2012 book, “Restaurant Man,” “It was a frontal attack to chase us out.” He claimed Somerset had bought the building only to “flip it for a profit, and . . . objected to Del Posto’s below-market” rent. He called Somerset’s lawyer the “Antichrist.”
The Del Posto team dug in their heels. The court battle ended only when Somerset sold 85 Tenth to restaurant-friendly Related Companies for $430 million in 2007. After that, “It was settled within a day,” Cohen said.
Google went on gobbling up the neighborhood. It bought 111 Eighth Ave. for $1.9 billion in 2010. It leased 300,000 square feet at Chelsea Market and 360,000 at 85 Tenth Ave. — which could be next on Google’s “buy” list. Alphabet, with a $745.1 billion market value, can scoop up buildings like dinner mints.
But what’s next for Chelsea Market?
The thriving hall still draws celebs such as Ted Danson and Julianne Moore browsing shelves and Food Network stars like Emeril Lagasse heading for studios upstairs. Paul McCartney, Jimmy Fallon and Penny Marshall were spotted at Buddakan, which came to the building in 2006, after appearing on “SNL.”
The main floor now has some chain eateries and isn’t as special as it once was. But downstairs has the old-time feel. One shop, Manhattan Fruit Market, is co-owned by a daughter of the original Fruit Exchange’s founder.
Each merchant has a separate lease and Alphabet could close them one by one — perhaps for an “experiential” showroom like Samsung’s nearby. Alphabet is silent on its plans. But tenants fear that the feeding frenzy Irwin Cohen’s fruit stand ignited 20 years ago might ultimately consume Chelsea Market itself.
“That’s sad for me,” Cohen said of possibly losing the market. “But Google’s purchase confirms that our city will stand as the information capital of the world.”