i hadn't been in here for awhile so i stopped in the stunning/soaring bridgemarket grocery for coffee yesterday morning. definately worth a visit to see underneath the bridge + the grocery's coffeeshop is cheap & superb (illy doubleshot americano $2).

 

the queensboro bridge base on manhattan's eastside has a long history of retail at it's base. from 1900 to 1930's it held a farmer's market. after that it was a nydot garage for a long time until it was finally totally redeveloped in 2000 into a grocery (a&p's food emporium flagship), an eventspace restaurant (guastavino's) and a modernist retail addition next door (conran's).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* all about it:

 

Page N6.1 . 07 June 2000     

 

New York Bridgemarket Opens After Decades in Restoration

 

by ArchitectureWeek

 

Bridgemarket has been one of New York City's best kept secrets: a cathedral-like space beneath the Queensboro Bridge adorned with a canopy of Guastavino tile vaults. Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, a leading architectural, planning, and interior design firm first presented plans for a market in 1977 and ushered the project through an extensive public review process and several design incarnations. After three decades, the public-private effort to redevelop the historic marketplace became a reality earlier this year with the opening of the main space.

 

Bridgemarket received its name after serving as a farmer's market in the early 1900s until the 1930s, when it became a New York City Department of Transportation facility. The new Bridgemarket includes Guastavino's restaurant, the Terence Conran Shop, a flagship Food Emporium, and a public plaza designed by Lynden Miller, who is well known for her work at Bryant and Battery Parks. Bridgemarket has been described as a catalyst for renewal of this East Side neighborhood and reclaims for use one of New York City's great civic spaces.

 

Bridgemarket is widely considered to be one of Rafael Guastavino's most dramatic and exciting public spaces. Guastavino, an architect from Barcelona, pioneered the adaptation of a centuries-old vernacular building technology called the boveda catalana, or Catalan vault, in which long flat tiles are laid in courses and mortared together with a special mixture of portland cement and cow bay sand. Guastavino vaults can be found in numerous grand interiors, including Grand Central Terminal, the U.S. Customs House, and the main hall at Ellis Island.

 

Creating a new destination in a historic space posed many challenges. The final design resulted from dialogue between Hugh Hardy and Terence Conran, who introduced a modernist sensibility. Originally designed to evoke 19th-century European marketplace structures, the shop's glass-and-steel pavilion is now a modernist foil to the massive bridge. The design is intended to complement, not overwhelm, the bridge and its remarkable canopy of vaults.

 

The development of Bridgemarket also represents collaboration with developer Bridgemarket Associates, New York's Economic Development Corporation and Department of Transportation, and private historic preservation groups. The DOT undertook the restoration of the tile vaults and terracotta details, as well as the installation of a historical series of insulating glass that maintains the character of the original industrial sash.

 

http://www.architectureweek.com/2000/0607/news_6-1.html

 

here is a shot of the restaurant/eventspace next to the grocery, it's named after guastavino

http://www.guastavinos.com/

 

next to the base is the conran home shop (wasn't open yet when i was there)

http://www.conranusa.com/content1.aspx?postingid=stores&language=en-US

Holy shit - that's an awesome space, great photos!  Must see during my next NYC trip.

That really is amazing. Incredible how much detail use to be used in architecture.

Thank you for sharing that! One of my dearest long-time friends lived in a fourth-floor walkup in a turn-of-the-century apartment building at 62 and 1st, where from one of the two windows one could see the Roosevelt Island Tram. On my visits we often walked in the vicinity of the bridge approaches which were mostly boarded up or closed off by tall arched wood-plank garage doors.

 

Greg told of on-again, off-again plans to reopen a market under the bridge, but what I visualized was a more primitive open farmers' market under bare-bones bridge structure. I never imagined that the space hidden by those huge doors was anything like that!

Well done!