New Plans for Harlem Mart 125 Finally?

Happy Labor Day Family!!!

This article comes from The New York Times....

In Plans for Vacant Harlem Market, City Envisions a Cultural Base

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: September 1, 2008

Across the street from the Apollo Theater is an indoor marketplace that the city once hoped would ease Harlem’s economic woes. Instead, the building has long been shuttered, the images of shoppers on its white facade rusting away.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Street vendors have set up stands outside the shuttered Mart 125 market, across from the Apollo Theater. It opened in 1986.

Over the years, efforts to redevelop the old market, called Mart 125, have failed. But this summer, the Bloomberg administration and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone have been gauging interest in the building’s prime location.

The city began soliciting proposals last month from nonprofit cultural organizations to occupy the ground floor of a building that would replace the vacant Mart 125 and would likely include a street-level performance space.

Arts groups in Harlem will be given preference, and officials with the city’s Economic Development Corporation said that several cultural organizations with sufficient financial resources and community involvement would be selected by October to vie for the space.
Only then, the officials said, would the Bloomberg administration seek a developer to construct the building. The officials said they expected the developer to work with one or more of the arts groups on a joint proposal.

The plan’s unusual mandate for a developer to include a cultural group with local ties is testament to the symbolic importance of Mart 125 among Harlem residents, said Lynnette Velasco, a spokeswoman for Councilwoman Inez E. Dickens, who represents central Harlem.
“Mart 125 was very, very important to the councilwoman from a historic perspective because it was a place originally designed for minority vendors and artisans to sell their goods,” Ms. Velasco said. “The councilwoman wanted what will replace Mart 125 to be a place where community people would be stakeholders.”

Once completed, the building would be near several other key Harlem cultural venues, including the Apollo, the National Black Theater, the Studio Museum in Harlem and a proposed complex at the Victoria Theater, which has also been vacant for many years.

Madelyn Wils, the executive vice president for planning and development at the Economic Development Corporation, said she did not believe that the various venues would be forced to compete for patrons.

Rather, she said, “these kinds of cultural hubs really work well because the organizations feed off each other.” She added that the theater district was an example.

City officials said that besides a ground-floor performance space with about 199 seats, the building would probably include a cafe and an NYC & Company tourist office specializing in attractions in Harlem and the rest of Upper Manhattan.

“The strategy is really to create a destination” for tourists and local residents, said Hope Knight, the chief operating officer of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, which is helping to finance the project. “There are a large number of visitors who come to 125th Street, and we felt that with a center there, we can get them moving around Upper Manhattan.”

Decisions about the height of the new building and whether it will be primarily office or retail space will not be made for several months. Ms. Wils said that the city would issue a request for proposals from developers in November and choose a winner next year.

Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, who represents central Harlem, said he did not want the site to be occupied by chain stores, which have proliferated along 125th Street.

The latest additions to the area around Mart 125 include a Starbucks, which opened its second branch on 125th Street, just blocks from its first Harlem coffeehouse, and now has four in the neighborhood. American Apparel, a youth-oriented clothing store with branches all over the city, including in SoHo and the Upper East Side, also opened a branch recently on 125th Street.
“I’m all chained out,” Mr. Wright said. “I would like to see Mart 125 have some remnant of what it was originally slated to be — an incubator for vendors. I would like to see some retail with some community folks able to make some money.”

When Mart 125 opened in 1986, the state rented stalls to street vendors and pledged to provide them with management training. The goal was for the market to operate as a small-business incubator, with budding entrepreneurs eventually starting their own stores in the neighborhood and perhaps even owning a stake in Mart 125.

The training never took place, however, and before long, the building began to deteriorate. Not enough customers followed the merchants inside, and vendors struggled to pay the rent, with many refusing to do so to protest the building’s leaky roof and faulty air-conditioning system. Finally, the Giuliani administration evicted the vendors, leaving the building empty since about 2001.

Proposals to turn the building into an arts complex, a Barnes & Noble and a restaurant have gone nowhere, but Ms. Wils said that this time the city was optimistic.

“There’s a lot of interest,” she said, “and we think we’ll have a strong group there.”

You know fam....as with a lot of people, places & things in Harlem...The Mart 125 brings up some really good memories for me....lol...it was where I met my "BFF" Gwen DeVoe and Wesley Snipes....But I also, unfortunately, remember just how badly it was run back in the day. It turned out to be nothing more than an enclosed flea market. Few of the vendors sold anything I ever wanted and when I would find something that would catch my eye...it was usually ridiculously overpriced. The lighting was pretty bad and they had a "tiny" bit of a rodent problem. The food court upstairs sold a lot of fried fish and that made the whole space a little funky smelling. My friends and I saw the end coming long before it actually happened.

I would love to see it become some sort of cultural performance space....that EVERYONE has access to...unlike some other performance spaces in Harlem that few can afford to use.

I guess we'll have to wait and see....

"There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls. There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain."