Essex Street at Delancey, then the glass hall under its folded white ceiling: vendor islands under swaying pendants, fish on ice, the butcher, the coffee bar and its chalkboard, an escalator up to the long shared table on the mezzanine, the works on every stall front.
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia built indoor municipal markets to clear the pushcart peddlers who had crowded Lower East Side streets since the 1880s. The Essex Street Municipal Market opened on January 9, 1940 with four buildings and 475 vendors serving Jewish and Italian immigrant families. After a 1995 consolidation the market operated at 120 Essex Street. In May 2019 the vendors moved across the street into a larger, modern hall at 88 Essex Street, part of the Essex Crossing development.
Source · Essex Market, Our Story ↗
The 2019 hall at Essex Crossing: a tall glazed street edge with the tower above, a folded plate ceiling with light in the folds, terrazzo, vendor islands and pendants, a moving escalator to the mezzanine, the communal table, the Delancey Street subway stair on the corner. Mood: saturday at noon. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.