New Food Hall Prepares for Debut at Pier 57 on Hudson River
Lower Manhattan is weeks away from the debut of yet another destination food hall. This one, to be called Market 57, will open in the spring at Pier 57, on the Hudson River waterfront, near West 15th Street. Market 57 is being spearheaded by the James Beard Foundation, a national culinary nonprofit organization, which plans to incubate a rotating lineup of women- and minority-owned artisanal food-service concepts in 15 market stalls.
“New York City is filled with a rich array of cultures, traditions, and culinary influences, and the vendors at Market 57 reflect that diversity,” says JBF president Clare Reichenbach, who also plans to use the new facility as a showcase for the organization’s Good Food for Good program, which seeks to celebrate and nurture chefs and other leaders who devise way to make America’s food culture more diverse and sustainable.
The 16,000-square-foot Market 57, located within the Hudson River Park, is the latest in a wave of food halls that began in New York with the 1997 advent of Chelsea Market. The craze took Downtown by storm starting in 2012, when the vogue for dining at communal tables, while also shopping for produce and takeout, was sparked by the acclaimed All Good Things market and restaurant in Tribeca. Although that establishment garnered universal praise, this was not enough to sustain it in a sluggish economy, and it closed two years later. A few months after All Good Things shuttered, however, Hudson Eats opened at Brookfield Place in Battery Park City, along with Le District, a French-inspired marketplace and collection of restaurants. In August, 2016, the trend gathered further momentum with the debut of Eataly in the World Trade Center complex. Since then, similar emporia, such as City Acres, Canal Street Market, the Essex Street Market, the Bowery Market, and UrbanSpace have planted their flags Downtown.
Although the food hall concept originated in Europe, it has gained increasing traction with American consumers, who prize the perceived authenticity of eating and shopping in a stage-set atmosphere, along with the variety and quality offered by a marketplace that showcases independent and artisanal producers, while catering to locavores and customers seeking organic offerings. It has also proved expedient for real estate developers, providing a ready use for large volumes of commercial space that, in an earlier era, would have been occupied by supermarkets, department stores, or big-box retailers—all of which are under siege from online shopping.
But the mania for food halls is showing signs of having crested. Market Lane, a food hall in the Oculus shopping center of the World Trade Center complex opened in 2017, but struggled to gain traction for two years, before finally closing at the end of 2019. Other food halls have been derailed before even opening. The space that will be home to Market 57 was originally intended for the much-anticipated Bourdain Market, which was in development for five years, before celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain cancelled the project in late 2017, six months before his suicide. And plans for Sevahaus, another food hall (to be located at 205 Hudson Street, in Tribeca) were dropped, also in 2017, before it could debut.
The trend may yet have some life in it, however. Another large food hall recently opened to critical acclaim in the South Street Seaport, where noted chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten oversees a 53,000-square-foot seafood-centric version of the concept in the historic Tin Building, at Pier 17.
Pier 57 is located amid what has become recreation hub on the Hudson River shoreline, with the 2021 debut of nearby Little Island, which offers more than two acres of gardens, glades, lawns, performance spaces and picnic grounds, hoisted above the water by 280 slender concrete columns, and perched atop 132 flower-shaped masonry “tulips”—pods that appear to be separate platforms from outside Little Island, but form a continuous, undulating surface when seen from the inside.
Also coming to the same area this year will be Gansevoort Peninsula, a five-acre-plus chersonese between Gansevoort and West 13th Streets featuring a scenic beach (more for viewing the water than public bathing, owing to concerns about hygiene and safety), along with a 56,000-square-foot ballfield for use by local youth leagues, a playground, an outdoor “river gym” (consisting of rust-proof calisthenics equipment), a dog run, and public restrooms.
Pier 57 was built in the early 1950s as the New York terminal for the Grace Line cruise ships. In 1969, Grace decided to exit the passenger shipping business, and the pier became a bus depot for the New York City Transit Authority. In 2003, the bus depot was emptied, in anticipation of folding Pier 57 into the plan for the Hudson River Park, which had begun to take shape in the late 1990s. In the years since, Pier 57 has also become home to Google offices, and the latest incarnation of City Winery, the legendary music venue-cum-enoteca.