The old Essex Street Market has served its purpose for 78 years. Turns out, the 1940 building on the northeast corner of Essex and Delancey streets will be put to use for at least a few weeks longer. While the city has long promised an opening for a brand new Essex Market on the south side of Delancey later this fall, construction delays have now pushed back the opening until next year.
The vendors were told about the delay on Friday, and are expected to attend a walkthrough of the new facility today. Just before the weekend, we received the official announcement from the city’s Economic Development Corp., which operates the market:
Wid Chapman Infuses an Indian Eatery in Manhattan with Cultural Iconography
May 7, 2021
By Quinn Halman
The street food-inspired menu references cuisine from all over the sub-continent, like the iconography on the custom artwork. Photography by Will Ellis.
Whether following a scent wafting through Essex Street Market in Manhattan’s Lower East Side or catching a glimpse of the vibrant awning on Delancey street, the sights and smells of the Indian restaurant Dhamaka are hard to ignore. Helming the kitchen is lauded chef, Chintan Padya, who tapped Wid Chapman of his eponymous architecture studio to design the restaurant s interior. Translating into “bang!”, Chapman’s design for Dhamaka is inspired by its name, and the notion of
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro asked me to meet him on Frieda Zames Way, which is not an easy place to find on Google Maps.
No street view photos, no subway wait times nothing to feed our iPhone-era inclination to know exactly where we’re going,
all the time. As any serious investigative journalist would, I immediately turned to the internet, where a website called Oldstreets.com informed me that Frieda Zames Way is just an honorary name for the very workaday stretch of East 4th Street that lies between First Avenue and Avenue A.
When I finally made my way there on a blustering, unseasonably chilly afternoon, Jelly-Schapiro told me that the corner named for Zames is responsible for our most accessible catalog of New York City’s honorary street names. When a neighborhood resident wanted to know who exactly Zames was (a pioneering disability rights activist, in case you were wondering), she called the borough’s historian, who then commissioned retired urban planner Gilbert Tauber to
Photo credit: Plant-in-City.
If you walked past Lost Weekend, the coffee shop on lower Orchard Street last week, you might have noticed something beautiful in the window: a multi-level terrarium (it looked especially stunning at night). The temporary exhibition was not just something nice to gaze at on a warm summer evening; it was part of an innovative project being orchestrated by three urban designers.
Huy Bui, Carlos Gomez de Llarena and Jon Schramm have developed Plant-in-City, which at its most basic level, is made up of a sleek cedar planter, environmental sensors, a built-in irrigation system and an app connecting the whole ecosystem to the internet. Yes, there is an app, allowing owners to care for their terrariums no matter where they might be.
Essex Crossing’s new web site.
First off, Delancey Street Associates, the entity created as an umbrella organization for the developers, now has a website. The home page calls the project an “unprecedented development comprised of 1.9 million square feet of residential, commercial, and community space.” There’s not much information available as of yet that wasn’t released when Mayor Bloomberg announced the deal in September but there is an email signup for people interested in information about retail/office spaces and affordable apartments (there will be 500 residential units set aside for low and middle income New Yorkers). Leasing, the site notes, is expected to begin in the year 2017.