Salt City Market opens with neighborhood-entrepreneur vendors

SYRACUSE — The newly opened Salt City Market boasts it offers “regional and international cuisine from entrepreneurs in your neighborhood” and is the “food hall for all.”

Salt City Market, located at 484 S. Salina St. in Syracuse, formally opened Jan. 29.

The two anchor tenants in the 78,000-square-foot, four-story building are the Syracuse Cooperative Market and Salt City Coffee. Other tenants include food entrepreneurs like SOULutions Sley’s Southern Cuisine; Baghdad Restaurant; Big in Burma; Firecracker Thai Kitchen; Pie’s The Limit; Cake Bar; Erma’s Island providing “Jamaican dining at its best;” Mamma Hai; and Miss Prissy’s, per the market’s website. 

Some vendors at the newly opened Salt City Market are hiring workers. For example, Erma’s Island is looking for an AM/PM prep cook and cashier and the Firecracker Thai Kitchen is also seeking an AM/PM prep cook, a PM line cook, and a cashier. Other vendors also had some similar job openings.

Salt City Market’s Jan. 29 opening attracted consumers immediately, according to its Facebook page and also photos from the event.

“We’ve been open for less than two hours and the response has been absolutely incredible!,” the organization posted on Facebook. The same post also advised would-be patrons that “in order to maintain capacity, there is a line outside — however, it moves quickly and the wait has only been 5-10 minutes.”

Besides the food-related tenants, the Salt City Market will also include 26 apartments and space for the Allyn Family Foundation. 

The market’s website also says organizers started thinking about the project earlier this century. Then, the Allyn Family Foundation formed the nonprofit-operating entity, the Syracuse Urban Partnership, to make the project a reality. 

Through the nonprofit, the Allyn Family Foundation in 2018 assembled the construction and design team to work on the project. 

VIP Architectural Associates, PLLC of Syracuse, along with New York City–based ICRAVE and Minneapolis, Minnesota–based Snow Kreilich Architects, were selected to design the building. They worked to design a building that would “fit our unique urban setting, that would work well for our small businesses, and would be a place where people of all walks of life would want to gather together,” per the market’s website. 

Throughout the process, the foundation held a series of focus groups and community gatherings to “ensure that everyone in Syracuse could feel connected and invested in the project,” the website says. 

Construction started in the fall of 2019.

The Allyn Family Foundation committed about $25 million toward the project and was able to secure a series of grants and tax credits. 

In the fall of 2020, “in partnership with the Rose Urban Green Fund and JP Morgan Chase,” the project received new market tax credits, per the website. It marked “only the second time” that a real-estate project in Syracuse had ever secured new-market tax credits.

Project origin

The Salt City Market is based on a model built by the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC) located in Minneapolis.

The nonprofit NDC has helped start more than 400 businesses in the Twin Cities region. Many of those business launched in the Midtown Global Market, a large public market owned and managed by NDC. 

NDC has “long had a connection to Syracuse” through its partnership with the Upstart program, which CenterState CEO operates. Through that existing relationship, the Allyn Family Foundation teamed up with CenterState CEO and NDC to develop a “similar concept” for the food hall that is under construction in Syracuse.