Google NYC - Chelsea Market Annex (New York City, New York)

 office building, interesting place

Chelsea Market is an enclosed urban food court, shopping mall, office building and television production facility located in the Chelsea neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan. Built in the former National Biscuit Company factory complex where the Oreo cookie was invented and produced, the 22-building complex by Romeyn & Stever fills two entire blocks bounded by Ninth and Eleventh Avenues and 15th and 16th Streets, with a connecting bridge over Tenth Avenue.

One of the main buildings is located on the Ninth Avenue side, rising 8 floors, and was completed in 1907, designed by A.G. Zimmerman. It is clad in brown brick, terra-cotta and wavy copper panels crossing the facade. A recent addition is an angular, organic metal and glass canopy that covers the ground floors, and then runs up the corner of the building at West 15th Street.

At the other side of the block, on the east side of Tenth Avenue, is the bakery building completed in 1892. Architects Romeyn and Stever designed a massive, brown brick fortress-factory for the new company. Six-story tall arches, each inscribing three bays, march along the building's three facades. Seven-story tall pavilions, topped by peaked roofs, ornamented the Tenth Avenue entrance, the building's last bays on 15th and 16th Street, and the main entrance on W. 15th Street. The flagship 1892 building received one of its most significant alterations in 1904, when the company routed a siding of the New York Central Rail Road through the building's open courtyard. The company also built a NYCRR viaduct and a sky bridge across Tenth Avenue, linking its buildings on both sides of the avenue. Between the two end buildings fronting Ninth and Tenth Avenues, Nabisco erected a 6-story Romanesque-revival bakery between 1903 and 1906, designed by William F. Wilmoth.

On the west side of Tenth Avenue, the company erected its Eleventh Avenue Factory in 1914 to designs by in-house architect Albert G. Zimmerman. The 11-story building displays the company's by-then national architectural identity of brick, terra-cotta and copper, and wide windows framed by brick piers. This building (85 Tenth Avenue) was purchased by Level 3 Communications in 1998 to house equipment to handle the anticipated surge in Internet transactions from the dot-com boom. Level 3 sold the building in 2003, but remains a tenant. Stone inscriptions above the entrances read "NBC", standing of course for National Biscuit Company. The conversion of the entire complex into the present Chelsea Market began in the 1990s, and was handled by architect Jeff Vandeberg for Irwin B. Cohen.

In 2018, the building was purchased by Google for around $2.4B as an annex for their headquarters next door.

www.chelseamarket.com/

www.smithsonianmag.com/history/factory-oreos-built-1809...
therealdeal.com/2019/05/22/google-scoops-up-another-jam...
www.jstor.org/stable/community.12097366