My lower Manhattan food-finding path almost always takes me by First Avenue’s Theater for the New City, a doggedly idealistic nonprofit performance space founded in 1971. General admission tickets, always wickedly cheap, are twenty dollars. For decades, though, I never noticed the clean, incised lettering above the theater doors: first avenue retail market . The building went up in 1937 and was opened the following year in person by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Around this time, La Guardia, using Works Progress Administration funds, created a scatter of city-owned and city-run food stores, including the Bronx Terminal Market, Essex Street Market, Fulton Fish Market Complex, and Gansevoort Market, sites intended to push pushcarts off the streets—La Guardia abhorred them—and, in return, give traders shelter and access to loading docks, running water, and electricity.…