City officials hope La Marqueta, a landmark East Harlem market, will get a shot in the arm after a bakery and nonprofit job training program sets up shop in the space. Borough reporter Rebecca Spitz filed the following report.

Soon, Jessamyn Waldman will not be selling her breads only in green markets. The nonprofit Hot Bread Kitchen, which Waldman serves as executive director, was selected to operate a kitchen incubator in La Marqueta, a vast indoor market in East Harlem.

Hot Bread Kitchen is also a job training program for immigrant women and other small business owners in the city. Waldman says she has big plans once the group is in La Marqueta.

"We're really, really excited about it," says Waldman. "In addition to providing licensed commercial space, we'll be offering workshops and additional support, so that small businesses owners can really have their businesses move from microenterprise to scalable enterprises that create jobs and revenue for the community and the city at large."

La Marqueta has been a fixture in the neighborhood since 1936. In its heyday, it contained hundreds of stalls with vendors selling ethnic food and dry goods. Now there are only seven.

"Dead, dead, real dead. I'm not even making the money for the rent," said La Marqueta vendor Jose Cintron. "So I hope these people now come and maybe I can do better."

The idea to put an incubator in La Marqueta came from the City Council, which is spending between $1.5 million to $2 million to convert the under-utilized space.

"This is really a moment where New Yorkers, maybe someone who's had this dream and just lost their job on Wall Street, this is going to be a place where they can go, get off of unemployment, get working in a way that is helpful to the city and also delicious for all of us," says City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

The renovated 10,000-square-feet space, which will be shared between the Kitchen and vendors, belongs to the City's Economic Development Corporation.

"At the same time, that we'll be creating new businesses, which will generate new taxes and new jobs for the city," says EDC President Seth Pinsky. "We're also going to be generating rent -- subsidized rent on the incubator space and market rent for Hot Bread's space. That will help defray the maintenance costs of what until now has been an empty space."

The EDC is talking about an aggressive timetable, saying that construction will start at the end of the month and the entire project will be finished by the end of the year.