Irwin Cohen, who turned a factory in Chelsea Market, dies at 90

Irwin Cohen, an inventive developer who transformed an abandoned factory that produced the first Oreo cookie in 1912 into Chelsea Market, a lavish 21st-century food bazaar that helped revitalize a New York City neighborhood, died Monday in Manhattan . He was 90.

The cause of death at a hospital was pneumonia, his son-in-law Blair Effron said.

In creating the market, Mr. Cohen reconfigured the first National Cookie Company factory – a complex of 17 1890s-era brick buildings that fill a block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets – into an industrial-chic destination for foodies and a home for video production studios.

The repurposing of the factory stimulated the gentrification of West Chelsea. It has also helped transform the Meatpacking District, south of the market, into a hotbed of trendy venues; helped secure the success of the High Line, a reimagining of an abandoned elevated railway line on the market’s west flank as a green, ribbon-like park; and paved the way for a proliferation of high-tech companies that renamed the neighborhood Silicon Alley.

Mr. Cohen recalled this in an interview with the Center for an urban future that when he bought the West Chelsea property in 1993, “you couldn’t walk here.”

“It was controlled by prostitutes 24 hours a day,” he said. “I looked at it and said my goal was to have an eight-year-old child come here on public transportation, go shopping and go home so that his or her parents would feel safe. And that’s how it worked out.”

Carl Weisbrod, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation when Mr. Cohen bought the old Nabisco plant, said in an interview: “Irwin was one of the wisest, most thoughtful real estate developers I ever met. His specialty was creatively transforming older buildings, and Chelsea Market is a good, unique example. It was a catalyst for today’s Chelsea.”

Mr. Cohen and his daughter and co-developer Cheryl Cohen Effron brought in the architect Jeff J. Vandeberg and the sculptor Mark Mennijn to convert the ground floor of the labyrinthine hodgepodge of buildings into a winding, 250-foot-long central hall, flanked by local vendors, including wholesalers who also sold to private customers.

They abandoned plans to consolidate local outlets into a central flower market and decided instead to emphasize food as emblematic of the city’s melting pot.

“The idea was to take advantage of New York’s ethnic diversity,” Mr. Cohen told The New York Times in 1999.

Since the market opened in 1997, ground-floor tenants have included Amy’s Bread, Frank’s Butcher Shop, Sarabeth’s Bakery, Lobster Place, Ruthy’s Bakery & Cafe and Fat Witch Bakery.

The basement and upper floors of the building were leased to Spectrum News NY1, Major League Baseball Productions, the Food Network and the Oxygen Network.

Mr. Cohen had managed apartment buildings and clothing manufacturing sites in the city. The name of his company, ATC, stands for “around the clock,” the kind of environment he hoped to create.

“The building is a community, and he is the mayor of Chelsea,” Stuart Romanoff, who represented NY1 in the 55,000-square-foot lease in the building as an executive at the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, told The Times in 1999.

Chelsea Market’s eclectic space is punctuated by remnants of the Nabisco factory, such as a waterfall spouting from a cast-iron ceiling pipe into a 23-foot well.

Mr. Cohen had developed and managed multi-tenant factory buildings in Long Island City, Queens since the 1970s, when he and his daughter purchased the former Nabisco factory at 75 Ninth Avenue, and a Nabisco property across the street, at 85 10th Avenue. for $14 million, with financial assistance from private investors. Jamestown Properties later purchased a majority stake. In 2018, Google purchased 75 Ninth Avenue for $2.4 billion.

In 2003, after selling the 10th Avenue property, Mr. Cohen and other investors bought it back for about $57 million. Already home to Frank’s, a now-closed steakhouse, it became home to Del Posto, an acclaimed Italian restaurant opened by Mario Batali and the mother-and-son team of Lidia and Joseph Bastianich. (Del Posto closed in 2021.)

Irwin Bernard Cohen was born on September 29, 1933 in Brooklyn. His father, Jack, was a tailor who owned a sewing shop and also owned a candy store, where Irwin’s mother, Molly (Lesner) Cohen, ran the soda fountain.

After graduating from Tilden High School, he earned a business degree from New York University in 1954 and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1958, after working as a photographer to pay his tuition. He joined a law firm that pioneered real estate syndications.

In 1957, Mr. Cohen married Jill Framer; she died in 2017. In addition to his daughter Cheryl, he is survived by two other daughters, Cindy Zuckerbrod and Cathy Lasry; 17 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. His siblings Bob, Norman and Gloria died. He lived in Manhattan.

Inspired by a shark tank he saw at a Las Vegas hotel, Mr. Cohen hoped to make waiting for the elevators at Chelsea Market less annoying by installing above-ground tanks with transparent bottoms that provided an unobstructed view of Congo eels, salamanders, African jumping frogs and crayfish. they twist, intertwine and sometimes devour each other. When asked in 1997 why he wanted reptiles instead of more mundane aquatic animals, he replied, “Anyone can fish.”

But two years later, he recognized that the reptile display was perhaps the one—perhaps the only—design experiment on the market that was a little too exotic. The eels and salamanders and frogs and crayfish were replaced by more prosaic tropical fish.

“The others ate each other,” he said.