Architecture

How This Innovative Building Helps Feed 1.5 Million New Yorkers

City Harvest’s newly opened Brooklyn campus was designed by Ennead Architects and Rockwell Group
kitchen in a building
Designed by the Rockwell Group, this showroom kitchen is where members of City Harvest’s illustrious Chefs Council, such as Eric Ripert or David Chang, can prepare meals for assembled guests.Photo: Jason Varney for Rockwell Group

Autumn in New York, as the old jazz standard goes, is often mingled with pain. When families across the city sit down to Thanksgiving dinner this month, 1.5 million of their neighbors will go hungry. According to statistics gathered by Feeding America, one in four children across New York experience food insecurity, and visits to food pantries have been up 69% since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation has only made matters worse.

Enter City Harvest, New York’s largest food rescue organization. A sprawling non-profit founded in 1982, comprising 23 rescue trucks, 190 staff members, and thousands of volunteers, City Harvest is more than just a massive pantry feeding the hungry across the five boroughs—it’s a donation and distribution hub for fresh produce that farmers or grocery chains can’t sell or won’t keep (this year only there were 75 million pounds, hence the term “food rescue”). City Harvest runs farmers markets across the city, where produce is distributed to communities in need, and workshops to teach cooking and nutrition tips. A Healthy Retail program helps independent grocers across New York obtain low-cost quality produce to sell, and an app called Plentiful allows users to locate nearby food pantries and soup kitchens.

The 150,000-square-foot complex more than doubles City Harvest’s food storage and loading capacity at a time of surging need.

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto, Courtesy of Ennead Architects

For decades, City Harvest’s critical mission has been run from a Manhattan office and warehouses in Queens. This month, its operations came together under one roof at the Cohen Community Food Rescue Center, a vast campus in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park designed by Ennead Architects and Rockwell Group. The 150,000-square-foot complex—located in a Brooklyn train repair depot from the 1890s and an adjoining warehouse—more than doubles City Harvest’s food storage and loading capacity at a time of surging need. Adaptable storerooms can hold dry goods or transform into fully sealed freezers. (One has already been stocked with Thanksgiving turkeys.) Plaster has been stripped back, exposing the historic brick, and along one wall, a colorful geometric mural brightens up the otherwise cold and industrial space.

Inside the new campus that will house hundreds of staff members and thousands of volunteers who help feed those who need it the most.

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto, Courtesy of Ennead Architects

Ennead’s design for the rest of the complex similarly exposes the existing framework of the building and maximizes natural light. The open-plan offices fill a vast hall with the form and scale of a Romanesque church, where exposed whitewashed wood beams catch the rays from a twin set of clerestory windows. 

Of many commissioned artworks throughout the building, a series of amoebic sculptures—made from zip ties by the Brooklyn-based artist Sui Park—stands out by floating cheerfully above the sea of desks. An almost identical and multi-purpose space nearby will host what City Harvest calls “corporate repacks,” which are sessions where volunteers break down pallets of produce into smaller and more distributable sizes. On one recent morning, the space held a health-and-wellness fair for employees and truck drivers, who could even receive on-the-spot dental care. 

This hall joins the 4,000-square-foot Storefront, another multi-purpose space, at the Second Avenue entrance, which City Harvest intends to program based on local community needs. Food insecurity is an acute problem in Sunset Park, and so the building’s extensive parking lot will host City Harvest’s second mobile market location in Brooklyn—and ninth across New York City—beginning in June 2023.

A look inside the demonstration kitchen designed by the Rockwell Group

Photo: Jason Varney for Rockwell Group

In addition to bringing employees to volunteer, corporate donors can enjoy a meal in the Cohen Center’s new events space, designed by the Rockwell Group. A parquet floor and wood paneling reclaimed from barns in upstate New York, along with an entry carpet made from salvaged rugs, brings warmth to the 240-seat hall. A showroom kitchen with brass fixtures and terra-cotta tiles fronts a full industrial kitchen where members of City Harvest’s illustrious Food Council, such as Eric Ripert or David Chang, can prepare meals for assembled guests. On the adjoining terrace, Loll deck chairs made from recycled milk jugs face a panoramic vista of New York harbor. “City Harvest’s community-based mission, the mission of sustainability and reuse, and the need for flexibility are three things that so many events spaces don’t have, and that made this project so exciting,” David Rockwell says.

Few nonprofit organizations in the world can meet such immediate need from such spacious and inviting accommodations. With the Cohen Center (which was developed with generous support from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation), City Harvest has the means to considerably expand. “We have room to grow,” says CEO Jilly Stephens with pride. “One hopes that over time we’ll see need for food subside, and then we can use this space for whatever the community needs, but right now New York needs a food pantry.”