Quick answer
Chelsea Market is a food hall and office building in Chelsea, Manhattan, built inside the 1890s factory where Nabisco invented the Oreo. The whole block was converted to a retail concourse in the late 1990s, and the High Line elevated park now runs straight through one side of it.
Full transcript
The cookie factory
Chelsea Market is easy to miss from the outside for exactly the right reason: it is still the 1890s Nabisco factory block, a whole city block of brick and iron between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. In the National Biscuit Company kitchens here, the Oreo cookie was invented and mass-produced, built to travel and to sell across a nation raised on cracker barrels. The industrial building stayed at work for a century, and its ground floor was redeveloped in the late 1990s into a long, brick-vaulted concourse of food stalls and makers. Walk in through the Ninth Avenue entrance and the smell does the rest of the explaining.
Breakfast for a factory, lunch for a city
Inside, the vaulted concourse opened in 1997 lines one continuous corridor with vendors selling bread, pasta, seafood, dumplings, chocolate, and coffee — a market built around a working food system, stitched together from the old back lots of separate factory buildings. Above the retail level, offices took over, with media studios (the Food Network shot shows here) and, more recently, Google's parent Alphabet owning the whole block. The building even grows returns the old way: vendors and restaurants feed each other, raw seafood moving from ice counters to the kitchens steps away. It is less a mall than a neighborhood market that kept its factory floor.
What to do here and on the roof
Come hungry and let a single loop of the concourse be your meal — start with pasta, add a sandwich, finish on sweets. Then step outside and up onto the High Line, the elevated park that opened in 2009 and threads through the building's Tenth Avenue side; from the deck you look down across the market's rooftop vents and chimneys like scenery. Time it for late morning, before the lunch crush, and save the crowded weekends. Stand in the concourse a moment and notice the thick brick arches overhead — the same ones that housed the world's most famous cookie for the better part of a century.