Chelsea Market and the Birth of the Oreo

The block long building on your right, with its arched windows and worn brick, used to be one of the largest bakeries in the world, and it is the birthplace of the Oreo cookie.

Beginning in the eighteen nineties, several bakeries built facilities on this block along Ninth Avenue, and in eighteen ninety eight they merged into the National Biscuit Company, known today as Nabisco. The combined factory eventually grew into nineteen separate connected structures covering the entire city block, turning out crackers and cookies for the whole country. It was here, in early nineteen twelve, that bakers first produced a new sandwich cookie, two chocolate wafers with a cream filling between them. The very first one was sold on March sixth, nineteen twelve, to a grocer across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the name Oreo was trademarked just over a week later. More than a century on, it remains the best selling cookie in the country.

Nabisco kept expanding this complex for decades before finally moving its operations out to the suburbs in nineteen fifty eight. The buildings sat in mixed industrial use for years afterward, until a developer named Irwin Cohen began converting them in the nineteen nineties into the food hall and office complex known as Chelsea Market, which opened its retail concourse in April of nineteen ninety seven.

Today the building houses dozens of food vendors and television studios, but the brick walls and iron columns passing by on your right are the same ones that once produced, by some accounts, more cookies and crackers than almost any factory on earth, including the very first Oreo ever sold.