International Center of Photography Will Move to Essex Crossing

Just a couple of weeks ago, Essex Crossing unveiled renderings for its second phase, and now there’s more news coming out of the six-acre urban renewal area rising above the Lower East Side. The International Center of Photography will move there in 2019.

Currently, ICP has a school in midtown and a museum that opened on the Bowery just a little over a year ago. In January of last year, after Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum ditched plans for Essex Crossing, a rep let slip that ICP might be planning to take space there alongside an NYU Langone facility and a location of Think Coffee. Tomorrow ICP will officially announce the move.

According to a press release forwarded to B+B, the school will move to Essex Crossing during the summer of 2019 and the museum will move early that year, after it wraps up its fall 2018 exhibition in mid-January of 2019. The museum will occupy a four-story building with an entrance at Ludlow and Essex, and will connect to the adjacent school, which will occupy three stories of a 14-story building at 242 Broome, designed by SHoP Architects. Both interior spaces, totaling about 40,000 square feet, will be designed by Gensler, a firm that has previously done offices for Etsy and Airbnb.

Across the street will be the Market Line, featuring a 150,000 square foot marketplace incorporating gallery and performance spaces, fashion and food vendors, a beer hall, and the new location of Essex Street Market. With over 100 vendors expected, the market is billing itself as one of the largest and best in the world; its first phase is expected to launch next spring.

Late last month, Delancey Street Associates, the developers of Essex Crossing, put out a request for proposals for a 220-foot-long mural that will adorn the western facade of 145 Clinton Street. That building with contain a Trader Joe’s and a Target.

Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified the creator of the rendering.