The New Union Square: Revealed!

Something has gone wrong in Union Square Park this summer. Complaints about illegal behavior, drug use, and vagrancy have led to a 320% increase in police citations. Now the police are patrolling much mor aggressively, as are hired security teams from the Union Square BID.

On October 26, the owners of the upcoming Reyna restaurant, which is taking over the Le Midi space on 13th St., held an introductory Zoom call. Attendance was sparse, but it was interesting to hear their plans and to have the chance to voice concerns pre-emptively.

The restaurant will likely be open until 11 on weekdays and midnight on weekends. It is meant to be an upscale drinking/dining experience, not a noisy bar. They will also be using the Karaoke Cave space as a site for “French Karaoke” as well as sort of a holding space for people who may be waiting for a table (a problem Le Midi certainly never had).

They also plan to build a street-side dining shed, most of which will occupy the space now being used by Corkbuzz.

In general, they seemed quite eager to hear about any issues that nervous neighbors like us might have ahead of time, rather than deal with our anger later. They hope to open in the March/April time frame.

You can get an idea of what Reyna will be like by visiting the Web site for their two locations in Toronto:  www.barreyna.com 
If you have any questions, you can contact them directly:

Nicki at nicki@barreyna.com
Etienne at 646-421-4242.

The New School has been saying since late February that it now plans a smaller building on its 5th Ave. site.

Next week (May 28 to June 1), Superstructure work will continue at the 18th floor level. The superstructure concrete work will be completed on the building by the end of the month. We will begin pouring concrete at 6am on Friday the 25th in order to finish in a timely manner. Deliveries for the internal systems of the building have been ongoing and will continue, although they should not greatly affect the flow of pedestrian and road traffic. The site will be closed on Monday, May 28th for the Memorial Day Holiday.

The following week (June 4 to June 8), we will be working on the machine room levels on the 18th floor. Additionally we will have another crane on the Northwest corner of the site to help with a steel truss installation. This should not greatly affect pedestrian or road traffic. Deliveries for the internal systems of the building have been ongoing and will continue, although they should not greatly affect the flow of pedestrian and road traffic.

Once again, Jeremiah of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York eulogizes another block lost to development, in this case the nearby block of 3rd Ave. between 13th and 14th Streets.

From the NY Times:

Barry Benepe, an urban planner who in 1976 conceived of inviting farmers to truck their ripe tomatoes, peppery arugula and fresh corn to forlorn patches of New York City, delivering bustling markets and excitement to the city along with flavorful and healthy food, died on Wednesday at his home in Saugerties, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 96.

New York’s popular Greenmarkets, the largest farmers’ market network in the country, helped start a national farm-to-table culinary movement. They are credited with saving thousands of acres of farmland in the region from development and reviving urban neighborhoods. Renowned chefs who discovered the bounties of fresh strawberries and zucchini blossoms were soon buying much of their seasonal produce from Greenmarket stalls.

Mr. Benepe (pronounced BEN-eh-pea) raised grant money and worked the city bureaucracy to organize the first market with a colleague, Robert A. Lewis, whose role was to recruit wary farmers. During a decade of high crime and urban decay in New York, farmers feared that whatever money they made would be boosted before they escaped the city.

Instead, the first Greenmarket — which kicked off in Manhattan in the summer of 1976 at East 59th Street and Second Avenue with a handful of upstate growers offering an open-air cornucopia — was an immediate success.

“It could not have been a better location,” between two popular department stores, Mr. Benepe recalled in a 2022 interview with On Hand, a foodie newsletter. “We were halfway between Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s. We were in the passage between the two, so you had to stop.”

By contrast, the Union Square market — today the rock star of Greenmarkets — did not have a promising start. It opened later that year, but for weeks nobody came to visit the farmers who had set up in a park strewn with litter and known for drug sales. Mr. Benepe personally watered crab apple trees on the site.

The market went on to anchor a neighborhood rebirth that included Danny Meyer’s Union Square Café and a multiyear improvement plan by the Parks Department.

“We both loved the idea of the city benefiting from the revival of a European kind of lifestyle,” Mr. Lewis, whom Mr. Benepe hired in 1975 for his one-man planning firm, said in an interview. “He’d spent so much time in France and England. The daily shopping at the market. The fresh bread — this is Barry, a romantic.”