CW Retail - Food Halls Report

Chelsea Market

C helsea Market is hardly a “pure” food hall concept. Its roughly 165,000 sf of space offers more than 35 food vendors selling virtually everything from “soup to nuts.” In addition, Chelsea Market features more than a dozen sit-down restaurant options. Roughly one third of its space consists of non-food-related retail. Yet that is precisely why this project is ranked at the top of our list. Food is clearly the driver behind this project, but the success of its non-food- related options certainly suggest what may be a future model for many urban retail projects. While we’re not implying that food tenants may ultimately become the dominant tenant group in urban retail projects, Chelsea Market is a clear example

of a project where food is the anchor; this trend is not going away any time soon.

As for the project itself, Chelsea Market is located in New York City’s up-and-coming Meatpacking District and is convenient to one of the West Side’s biggest tourism drivers, the High Line. It also benefits from its location on the ground floor of a massive, mixed-use creative office and television production complex in a converted historic warehouse building, a property that was once home to a Nabisco factory. Fittingly perhaps, the television production space in the building is where the Food Network originally filmed the “Iron Chef America” and “Emeril Live!” programs.

CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD

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