Wednesday, December 06, 2006
A Market Grows on the Lower East Side
FEW things can ignite a cook’s shame quite so powerfully as the realization that she doesn’t know the name and genealogy of every important purveyor of foodstuffs from here to the Maldives. I speak from my own sense of disquiet. Some months ago, a friend told me about the Essex Street Market, the 15,000-square-foot enclosed food hall on the lower East Side of Manhattan, and I felt as if I were a soprano hearing the name Donizetti for the first time.
The market has been in continual operation for the past 66 years. But it is thriving today as it never did, making available both the world of the bodega and the universe of the gourmand — Goya groceries and hams cured from pigs fed on acorns. That the market itself is shaped like a giant shoebox only adds to the sense that it has become a diorama of the city in demographic miniature. Hasidic men and Latina women come, as they always have, and they are joined now by young people of indeterminate sexuality, vocation or coiffure.
Five years ago the market was only 60 percent full, said Jose Figuereo, one of its overseers. But because of low rents and an influx of more prosperous neighbors, 26 vendors now occupy every square foot of selling space.
The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which runs the market, receives applications for new tenants on a weekly basis and, in a change from the past, will now rent only to food vendors. It leases space to vendors at $27 a square foot on average, less than a third the standard price food retailers pay in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn.
A few weeks ago Paradou, a restaurant in the meatpacking district, opened a takeout shop in the market. It joins Formaggio, an outpost of a specialty shop in Cambridge, Mass., and Saxelby Cheesemongers, which arrived earlier this year, started by a winsome 25-year-old former art student named Anne Saxelby. Ms. Saxelby apprenticed on a dairy farm in the Loire Valley after graduating from college. What sort of person might shop at an artisanal cheese counter, one whose name seems borrowed from “The Chronicles of Barsetshire”? It is easy to envision the cliché and yet Ms. Saxelby’s customers do not conform to it. Among the predictable lot of young downtown mothers who swaddle their infants in hemp are aging Hispanic women, one of whom, Ms. Saxelby explained, comes in a few times a week specifically to buy a cheese called Ascutney Mountain. Jehovah’s Witnesses seem to find their way to her as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/dining/06esse.html
FEW things can ignite a cook’s shame quite so powerfully as the realization that she doesn’t know the name and genealogy of every important purveyor of foodstuffs from here to the Maldives. I speak from my own sense of disquiet. Some months ago, a friend told me about the Essex Street Market, the 15,000-square-foot enclosed food hall on the lower East Side of Manhattan, and I felt as if I were a soprano hearing the name Donizetti for the first time.
The market has been in continual operation for the past 66 years. But it is thriving today as it never did, making available both the world of the bodega and the universe of the gourmand — Goya groceries and hams cured from pigs fed on acorns. That the market itself is shaped like a giant shoebox only adds to the sense that it has become a diorama of the city in demographic miniature. Hasidic men and Latina women come, as they always have, and they are joined now by young people of indeterminate sexuality, vocation or coiffure.
Five years ago the market was only 60 percent full, said Jose Figuereo, one of its overseers. But because of low rents and an influx of more prosperous neighbors, 26 vendors now occupy every square foot of selling space.
The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which runs the market, receives applications for new tenants on a weekly basis and, in a change from the past, will now rent only to food vendors. It leases space to vendors at $27 a square foot on average, less than a third the standard price food retailers pay in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn.
A few weeks ago Paradou, a restaurant in the meatpacking district, opened a takeout shop in the market. It joins Formaggio, an outpost of a specialty shop in Cambridge, Mass., and Saxelby Cheesemongers, which arrived earlier this year, started by a winsome 25-year-old former art student named Anne Saxelby. Ms. Saxelby apprenticed on a dairy farm in the Loire Valley after graduating from college. What sort of person might shop at an artisanal cheese counter, one whose name seems borrowed from “The Chronicles of Barsetshire”? It is easy to envision the cliché and yet Ms. Saxelby’s customers do not conform to it. Among the predictable lot of young downtown mothers who swaddle their infants in hemp are aging Hispanic women, one of whom, Ms. Saxelby explained, comes in a few times a week specifically to buy a cheese called Ascutney Mountain. Jehovah’s Witnesses seem to find their way to her as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/dining/06esse.html
Comments:
Why is this story relevant????
Comment Credit ---This article posted by 
: December 07, 2006 11:50 PM
: December 07, 2006 11:50 PM
I see a Chazir fissel in the pix.
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Comment Credit ---This article posted by : December 13, 2006 11:19 PM
: December 13, 2006 11:19 PM
