How vegetables, orange juice and cannoli gentrified Chelsea.

That you can buy anything in New York is news to nobody. That you can buy anything on West 15th Street is more of a recent phenomenon.

Irwin Cohen, the developer and chief of ATC Management, was the featured speaker Dec. 20 at the monthly B'nai B'rith Real Estate luncheon at the Cornell Club. Cohen is the father of the Chelsea Market, the 17-building mega-wholesale-retail-commercial campus in lower Chelsea, and he regaled the assembled lunch crowd with a brief history of how the center came to be.

Once upon a time, he alleged, the neighborhood wasn't so special.

"Picture the old southwest," he said. "Pimps, hookers, drugs, dilapidated buildings. That's what the neighborhood looked like six years ago."

Cohen was at that point trying to build business relationships with recently Glastnost-ed Siberian investors. When he got a tip that the old Nabisco Oreo factory complex had a debt for sale, he brought his comrades to have a look. After sneaking around some of the creaky back elevators, he asked them what they thought.

"I heard the two-letter response you always want to hear from Russian investors," Cohen recalled. "Da."

So his Siberians, with some help from Chase, provided the money for the complex, but Cohen now had 17 centenarian buildings in a neighborhood that was dicey at noon and Gomorrah at night.

"These two blocks were in deplorable condition. We had male and female prostitutes. Women would come down from uptown and dress like men to get male customers. You never saw young people there. So we tried these huge blinding lights, but the prostitutes would just pose under them. We tried writing down the license plates of the johns, but you'd get Jaguars with New Jersey plates. Finally we hired off-duty state police to sweep the neighborhood."

That problem aside, what to do with all that space?

"There's a good flower market on 16th Street near there, and I tried to talk them into taking some of my space, but we had no parking to offer. So I approached the vegetable wholesaler across the street, Lou Lotillo.

"I walked in, and the place was so tight people would just knock you over to get their orders. I asked for Lou, and while I was there a little piece of string came down from the ceiling and held a clip in front of my face. Somebody clipped an order to it, and then the string was pulled up to the second floor.

"So clearly they needed more space."

Not 17 buildings' worth, however.

"So then I was watching Zubin Mehta on television, and they asked him why he liked conducting the Israeli Symphonic Orchestra. He said, 'When I conduct in New York, I have one conductor; in Israel, I have 124."'

Light bulb goes off here. He needed 17 buildings' worth of conductors. The idea of a wholesale market was born.

Lou was hesitant, but eventually warmed to the idea of a wholesale market. But he blanched when Cohen used the dreaded R-word.

Retail.

Wholesalers, Cohen discovered, are not retailers and do not aspire to become retailers. Some hand-holding was required before they would consider it. Meanwhile, a lobster wholesaler was brought in; a Queens Italian food wholesaler who goes by the Cher-like moniker of Mimmo agreed to abandon Long Island City, but only after his pilgrimage to the home country. A then unknown mid-westerner named Amy was a tougher sale. Danny Meyer sold her to Cohen as the real thing, but she had just bought some condo space to operate out of. Bringing her on board meant Cohen had to buy her condo. Amy's Breads is now a premiere attraction at Chelsea Markets.

The sales pitch was simple: lease 8,000 square feet, and you will be a part of a 100,000 SF wholesalers' campus. Cohen wrapped the whole place in green ribbon as a symbol of unity. When the market opened and the wholesalers saw the traffic, they began to understand and, eventually, embrace the concept of retail.

That concept has made them all rich.

Cohen said he once caught Lou throwing out oranges that were blemished. "Squeeze them!" he implored. Lou now sells OJ by the ton. Coming soon - his own peanut butter.

Of course, a single market can't be spread out over 17 buildings. Commercial/tenants now include Major League Baseball, New York 1 television and the Food Network, plus the requisite dotcoms and other high-tech firms. Baseball just announced it was doubling the amount of space it occupies for its television productions facilities.

"Irwin took me to meet Sen. Charles Schumer," a bashful Lou told the lunch crowd. "The senator asked me how business was, and I said 'Great, since I got struck by lightning.'

"Irwin Cohen was my bolt of lightning.'"