What You’ll Eat at Vapiano

Art supply store Sam Flax is closing its store at 11 West 19th St. There are big savings on things like high-end office furniture, all kinds of art supplies, stationery, and lots of picture frames. The sale will run through June.

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.”

Be sure to check out Num Pang, the tiny new Cambodian sandwich shop on 12th St. just around the corner from University Place. The sandwiches, prices around $7.50 are fresh, spicy, and unusual, very much like Vietnamese banh mi. Crowds have overwhelmed the place in its early days, and it’s been sold out a few times. Still, very much worth a visit, even if the prices are more than double what you would pay for something similar down in Chinatown.

This year’s annual shareholder meeting will take place virtually on October 12. Watch your mail and e-mail for log-in details.

Witnick Real Estate Partners purchased a mixed-use, multifamily apartment building in Union Square for $23 million. The building, located at 30 East 14th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place, came with 30,720 square feet of air rights and sold for approximately $1,124 per square foot, meaning that a larger building might be on the way. But, plans for the property are unclear and Witnick did not respond to a request for comment.