Karate Next to the Lobby

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.”

Everybody loves Artichoke Pizza on East 14th, but the wait is too long.

Here’s a great article about the Union Square Holiday market.

A fascinating photo of the good old days. The view is north up Union Square East to Park Ave. South, then known as 4th Avenue. Note that the George Washington statue used to reside at the intersection of 14th St. and 4th Ave.

Save it from commercial interests setting up shop at the north end of the park that is. Here are all the details.

State of Play Hospitality group has signed a lease to open Flight Club, a technology-enabled darts gaming facility, at 31 Union Square West in Flatiron, Manhattan. This will be the group’s first venue in Manhattan, and its ninth lease for the Flight Club brand in North America. The location will be a global flagship for the brand. Flight Club will occupy a 10,700-square-foot space at 31 Union Square West, a 16-story Renaissance Revival building designed by architect Bruce Price. The building was constructed in 1902-03 as the headquarters of the Bank of Metropolis. It was designated a city landmark in 1988 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

The brand’s new location is scheduled to open in late 2025, joining the building’s history of housing venues like Zippers nightclub in the early 1980s, Metropolis restaurant and club in the late 1980s, and Blue Water Grill from 1996 until recently.

“We’ve been looking for the right real estate opportunity to land Flight Club in New York for over five years, and this site has the potential to be a genuine landmark for the city and the group,” said Toby Harris, CEO of State of Play Hospitality. “Both 31 Union Square as a building and the stunning split level Flight Club space are as close to the physical brief for the brand that we could wish for. I’m confident that by complementing and retaining the character of the building, we will be able to do it justice.”

Since launching the first U.S. Flight Club in Chicago in 2018, State of Play has expanded the brand to Boston, Houston, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Denver, with new venues set to open in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia in late 2024.