by Irwin Cohen, an inventive developer who transformed an abandoned factory where the first Oreo cookie was produced in 1912 into Chelsea Market, a lush 21st-century food bazaar that helped revitalize his New York City neighborhood, died Monday in Manhattan. . He was 90 years old.
His son-in-law Blair Effron said he died of pneumonia in a hospital.
By creating the market, Cohen reconfigured the old National Cookie Company Plant, a complex of 17 brick buildings dating to the 1890s, occupying a block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets, a chic industrial destination for foodies and a home for studios of video production.
The reuse of the plant fueled the gentrification of West Chelsea. He also contributed to the conversion of the meat processing district, south of the market, into a hotbed of fashionable establishments; helped ensure the success of the High Line, a reinvention of an abandoned elevated railroad on the market’s western flank as a ribbon-shaped green park; and set the stage for a proliferation of high-tech companies that rebranded the neighborhood as Silicon Alley.
Cohen recalled in a 2005 interview with the Center for an urban future that when he bought the property in West Chelsea in 1993, “you couldn’t walk here.”
“It was controlled by prostitutes 24 hours a day,” he said. “I looked at it and said my goal was for an 8-year-old to come here on public transportation, shop, and go home, and his parents feel safe. And that’s how it turned out.”
Carl Weisbrod, who was president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation when Cohen bought the former Nabisco plant, said in an interview: “Irwin was one of the wisest and most thoughtful real estate developers I have ever met. His specialty was creatively transforming old buildings, and Chelsea Market is an excellent and unique example. He was a catalyst for today’s Chelsea.”
Mr. Cohen and his daughter and business partner. Cheryl Cohen Effron recruited architect Jeff J. Vandeberg and sculptor Marcos Mennin redesigning the ground floor of the labyrinthine hodgepodge of buildings into a meandering, 800-foot-long central lobby flanked by local vendors, including wholesalers who also sold to retail customers.
They abandoned plans to consolidate local outlets into a central flower market and decided instead to emphasize food as emblematic of the city’s melting pot.
“The idea was to take advantage of the ethnic diversity of New York,” Cohen told the New York Times in 1999.
Since the market opened in 1997, ground floor tenants have included Amy’s Bread, Frank’s Butcher Shop, Sarabeth’s Bakery, Lobster Place, Ruthy’s Bakery & Cafe and Fat Witch Bakery.
The basement and upper floors of the building were rented to Spectrum News NY1, Major League Baseball Productions, Food Network and Oxygen Network.
Cohen had managed apartment buildings and garment manufacturing sites throughout the city. The name of his company, ATC, means “24 hours a day,” the kind of environment he hoped to create.
“The building is a community, and he is the mayor of Chelsea,” Stuart Romanoff, who represented NY1 in its lease of 55,000 square feet in the building as an executive with the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, told The Times in 1999.
Chelsea Market’s eclectic space is dotted with remnants of the Nabisco plant, like a waterfall gushing from a cast-iron roof pipe into a 24-foot well.
Mr. Cohen had developed and managed multi-tenant industrial buildings in the Long Island City area of Queens since the 1970s, when he and his daughter purchased the former Nabisco factory, at 75 Ninth Avenue, and a Nabisco property across the street at 85 10th Avenue. Avenue, for $14 million, with financial help from private investors. Jamestown Properties subsequently bought a majority stake. In 2018, Google bought 75 Ninth Avenue for $2.4 billion.
In 2003, after selling the Tenth Avenue property, Cohen and other investors bought it back for about $57 million. It was already home to Frank’s, a now-closed steakhouse, and became the home of Del Posto, an acclaimed Italian restaurant opened by Mario Batali and the mother-and-son team of Lidia and Joseph Bastianich. (Del Posto closed in 2021).
Irwin Bernard Cohen was born on September 29, 1933 in Brooklyn. His father, Jack, was a tailor who had a sewing business and also owned a candy store, where Irwin’s mother, Molly (Lesner) Cohen, ran the soda fountain.
After graduating from Tilden High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business from New York University in 1954 and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1958, after working as a photographer to pay his tuition. He joined a pioneering law firm in real estate syndications.
In 1957, Cohen married Jill Framer; she died in 2017. In addition to his daughter Cheryl, he is survived by two other daughters, Cindy Zuckerbrod and Cathy Lasry; 17 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. His siblings Bob, Norman and Gloria predeceased him. He lived in Manhattan.
Inspired by a shark aquarium he saw at a Las Vegas hotel, Cohen hoped to make waiting for elevators at Chelsea Market less tedious by installing elevated tanks with transparent bottoms that would allow unobstructed views of congo eels, salamanders, African jumping frogs and crabs. river. writhing, intertwining, and sometimes devouring each other. When asked in 1997 why he wanted reptiles instead of more common aquatic creatures, he replied: “Anyone can fish.”
However, two years later, he acknowledged that the reptile exhibit might have been one (perhaps the only) design experiment on the market that was a little too exotic. Eels, salamanders, frogs and crayfish were replaced by more prosaic tropical fish.
“The others ate each other,” he said.
