7. Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market
The shopping mall at the Bronx Terminal Market, which opened in 2009 on a large site near Yankee Stadium, checks several Postmodern boxes. It has a hodgepodge of facade surfaces and colors and a jumble of shapes that visually break up what might otherwise be a monolithic complex. While such attributes often strike detractors as garish and kitschy, they seem well-suited to retail buildings where the purpose is to attract people to spend money.
But wait a minute—this Postmodern work includes a nod to a different aesthetic paradigm. The Bronx Terminal Market mall replaced an old wholesale market of the same name and the 1930s era Bronx House of Detention for Men. A number of stone reliefs and statues from the jail were integrated into the new development. The lowbrow Postmodern and the highbrow classical coexist here, which seems to work because of Postmodernism’s inherent eclecticism.
Originally known as the Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market, this monument to consumerism was designed by BBG-BBGM and GreenbergFarrow architects. The inclusion of the historic artifacts was a requirement of the project’s environmental impact statement (EIS) to mitigate the impact of demolishing the historic buildings.