The article, "Tribeca Greenmarket manager shows Washington Market pix," in Downtown Post NYC on 9/22/14 has elicited some additional information about the Washington Market.

Robert LaValva, who wrote a letter to the editor about the Washington Market (DPNYC, 9/24/14), sent in a link to a New York Times article from March 7, 1999 describing a Washington Market building that was designed by the great pioneer of cast iron architecture, James Bogardus (1800-1874).

The article answers a question from a Times reader: "About 30 years ago, as the Washington Market area in lower Manhattan was cleared for urban renewal, the city dismantled an early cast-iron building and stored the pieces. The building, an architectural gem as I recall, was to be re-erected at a future date. What became of it?" the reader asked.

The answer: "It was stolen. James Bogardus, a pioneer in the design and construction of cast-iron buildings, built a group of stores for Edward H. Laing at Washington and Murray Streets in 1849. Using prefabricated cast-iron columns and panels, along with wooden spans and brick walls, Bogardus assembled the four-story structure in two months, an astonishing feat for the day," Daniel B. Schneider, The Times reporter, recounted.

He then went on to describe how the building was dismantled in 1971, the pieces stored, and then stolen from a storage lot at Washington and Chambers Streets. A few broken pieces were recovered and were supposed to be used in a replica of the original building to be erected in the South Street Seaport on Fulton Street, but those few precious scraps of Bogardus' building were also stolen in 1977.

"A facsimile of the building, lacking a single molecule of the original, was built at Front and Fulton Streets in 1983. It remains intact," said The Times.

For the complete article, click here. For a photograph of the Bogardus building in the Washington Market, click here.

Lynn Ellsworth, founder and chairperson of Tribeca Trust, an organization formed to educate people about the history of Tribeca and to preserve its historic scale and architectural character, sent a link to a film called "Too Much Johnson" that Orson Welles partially shot in the Washington Market in 1938. Welles was 23 at the time, and three years away from making "Citizen Kane."

"Too Much Johnson" was never completed and for a long time, it was thought to be lost. Ten reels of a work print on flammable nitrate were found in 2013 in a warehouse in Pordenone, Italy and sent to George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. for restoration.

"Too Much Johnson" is a silent film accompanied by music, invoking the farcical humor of the early silent films that Welles admired. The plot involves a voluptuous, married woman (Arlene Francis) whose lover (Joseph Cotten), has to make a hurried exit out the window when her husband comes home. He chases Cotten through the Washington Market, weaving in and out of crates and baskets and barrels and providing choice glimpses of the market stalls, the horse-drawn carts and the cobbled streets.

To learn more about the film, click here. To see it, click here.