NYC Council proposes Pike Place-type market for WTC site

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NYC Council proposes Pike Place-type market for WTC site

Saturday, August 17, 2002

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Call it the Seattle card.

The New York City Council played it this week in its bid for a seat at the table where the future of the World Trade Center site will be decided.

In unveiling its proposal, the council cited the example of the Pike Place Market as it touted the idea of a public market within the redevelopment.

Props for the council's news conference included a photo enlargement of shoppers browsing among the Pike Place stalls, an image downloaded from the market's Web site.


	The Filipino group Young Once dances yesterday at Pike Place Market in celebration of the public market's 95th anniversary. The flowers are entries in a flower arrangement contest. Paul Joseph Brown / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"Having a street-level open-air market is a lovely thought," Robin Forst, deputy chief of staff to Lower Manhattan Councilman Alan Gerson, said yesterday. "It's worked so well in Seattle."

But the concept drew a mixed reaction yesterday from vendors and visitors at the real Pike Place Market, which celebrated its 95th anniversary yesterday.

"It should be more of a memorial than a market," said Narea Kang, who lived in New York for 16 years until moving to Seattle this year and buying a produce stall in the market with her husband. "Like a park, or a monument to the people."

Another ex-New Yorker, Walt Compare, said he doubts a street market would make sense economically in Lower Manhattan.

"I don't think it would work quite as well, considering the price of real estate in that part of the city," Compare said, as he packed salmon in ice at the Pure Food Fish stand.

A veteran of the Fulton Street fish market in New York and of more recent street-market ventures in Portland, Ore., and other cities, Compare said most new street markets fail. They lack the history of the Pike Place Market and they don't draw as many tourists, he said.

And New Yorkers, he said, may be a little too abrasive to re-create the conviviality of Pike Place.

"People are a little easier here," he said. "It's a little more laid back."

But a few stalls down at City Fish, owner Jon Daniels said, "I think it's a great idea.

"If they get something in there that's kind of got the Old World feel. ... New York's a great seaport, and people could go there and get the fresh fish.

"If you've got a good customer base and a good product, you can make it fly."

And Sugar Peacock, visiting Seattle from her home near Sacramento, said the proposal seems like a good fit.

"You're drawing an eclectic, diverse group of people," she said amid the crowd swirling around the market's landmark bronze pig, "and that's what the World Trade Center should represent."

The New York City Council invoked the Pike Place Market as the most successful of its kind, not necessarily as a specific model, council spokesman Jake Lynn said. The council's news release mentions similar markets in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

A Pike Place Market spokeswoman said the market has received no official communication from the council, and Lynn said no one from the council's research team visited Seattle.

Still, Lynn said, "Something might come out of it looking very similar to the Pike Place Market. It's such an open book right now."

The City Council plan joins six other proposals for the Lower Manhattan site, which was leveled Sept. 11 by the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the trade center.

Council members have been pushing to be formally included on the board of the agency that was created to oversee the rebuilding. So far, their efforts have been unsuccessful.

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com.