TASTES: Meatpacking Meets Chelsea

WHERE THE MONEY GOES HISTORIC WALKING TOURS

This year, Lab High School Students and Lesley Doyel, Hands On History program instructor at Lab High School, will give walking tours of both the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, the two dynamic neighborhoods celebrated by the LAB TASTES event! They will be joined by Ms. Alli DiVincenzo of Remember NYC, and author of a new guide to the Meatpacking District and Gansevoort Street Markets. Hands On History will also host a table making available their newly published Hands on History Handbook.

The same tour will be given at 12:15pm and again at 1:15pm on the day of event, June 4^th 2011.

Sign up sheets will be available at the Hands On History table, and each tour is limited to 25 participants

Beginning at Gansevoort plaza, where Ninth Avenue and Little West 12th Street intersect with Greenwich and Gansevoort Streets, we will travel back in time to a busy farmers market teeming with customers and horse drawn traffic. We then proceed to the elevated freight trestle, now known as the High Line Park, entering by Gansevoort Stairway, and wind our way to the exit just above 14th Street.

As we make our way from the Meatpacking District into Chelsea, from the elevated park we'll look down to view important sites like the Hudson River piers, the irregular streets of Old Greenwich Village, the route of the Ninth Avenue Elevated, and visit the complex of buildings that once comprised the huge NaBisCo plant, now known as Chelsea Market.

Inside Chelsea Market, birthplace of the Oreo Cookie, we'll see the many ways in which the adaptive reuse of this historic structure celebrates its past, through artifacts, photomurals, and exhibits illustrating the evolution of Nabisco baked goods. From the huge and cumbersome cracker barrels, the National Biscuit Company moved into the 20th century with innovations in packaging, including waterproof tin containers featuring the all important "inner seal" symbolized by a little boy wearing a yellow slicker.

Our tour will conclude by exiting the Market on Ninth Avenue and strolling back down to the Gansevoort Plaza to enjoy more of the food, music and entertainment of LAB Tastes: Meatpacking Meets Chelsea.