Rialto Redux

The Greenmarket at Oculus Plaza, the open-air farmer’s bazaar in the World Trade Center, will be returning for its second year at the newly rebuilt complex, starting today and continuing each Tuesday through October 30.

Among the dozen-plus vendors who will populate this year’s market are 1857 Spirits/Barbers Farm Distillery (offering handcrafted potato vodka from Schoharie County); Body & Soul (baked goods from Brooklyn);

Consider Bardwell Farm (raw cow and goat milk cheeses, plus wood-fired maple syrup, from Rutland County, Vermont); Fantastic Gardens of Long Island (plants and flowers); Francesca’s II Bakery (breads and baked goods from Middlesex County, New Jersey); Kernan Farms (vegetables from Cumberland County, New Jersey); Meredith’s Country Bakery (baked goods from Ulster County); Migliorelli Farm/From the Ground Brewery: (vegetables, orchard fruit, and beer from Dutchess County); and Samascott Orchards/Nine Pin Ciderworks (orchard fruit, strawberries, and hard cider from Columbia County).

The Farmers’ Market on the morning of September 11th, 2001

The market is a reprise of a popular Downtown institution that sold fresh produce outdoors, on Liberty Street, at the foot of the south tower of the original World Trade Center, each summer, starting in 1984. Its last day was on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Finding a new home for Lower Manhattan’s equivalent of an agora took 16 years, but it reopened last June, to enthusiastic support from local residents and workers.

After the destruction of the World Trade Center, multiple attempts were made to bring the market back, with locations that included Zuccotti Park, Battery Park City (at two locations outside of Brookfield Place), and the former entrance to the PATH station on Vesey Street. But none of these venues offered vendors sufficient space or foot traffic to achieve critical mass, and each effort was eventually abandoned.

The Greenmarket at Oculus Plaza is managed by GrowNYC, a non-profit organization of more than 50 farmers’ markets across the City, along with gardening, recycling and education programs.

“We are thrilled to bring the Greenmarket back to the World Trade Center site,” says GrowNYC president Marcel Van Ooyen. “The notion of community is integral to the work we do at GrowNYC, and this reunion of Greenmarket farmers with the community of Lower Manhattan is immensely meaningful. In addition to gaining access to healthy, local products, Greenmarket customers at the market will once again find comfort in the familiar faces of their favorite farmers.”