Every year, there is talk of revitalizing the La Marqueta marketplace, which sits under the Metro North viaduct on Park Avenue in East Harlem. But it’s possible the once-bustling and crowded Puerto Rican marketplace might turn out to be nothing but a wistful memory for East Harlem’s residents.

Opened in 1932 by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, La Marqueta’s hundreds of vendors sold fresh tropical fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish – as well as clothes, music records, and other goods – to the surrounding Italian, German, Jewish, and Puerto Rican community. Although there were some Jewish and Italian fishmongers, as Puerto Ricans came in droves to the area, it quickly became a marketplace that sold all the comforts of the island home Puerto Ricans had left behind.

La Marqueta thrived until the late sixties and seventies, when the emergence of larger grocery stores – and rising rent – began forcing tenants out. Soon, it all but disappeared along with 29-cent cartons of eggs and glass milk bottles.

Lidia Ramon has been in East Harlem for nearly half a century. She was one of many Puerto Ricans who moved to the area during waves of immigration from the island to Upper Manhattan in the decades after World War II. Tending to her flowers and vegetables in a Park Avenue community garden next to the rumbling train tracks above, she remembers the marketplace that spanned only five city blocks, but was once home to hundreds of vendors.

“It was so good,” she recalls. “Everyone came to it from around here, and from afar. There were people selling clothes, seafood, vegetables. But when supermarkets came, businesses started failing and they began leaving. Now there are only a couple left.”

For years, community leaders and investors have claimed they had the plan to bring La Marqueta back, but various proposals to revitalize it have fallen through. The latest failed plan belonged to the non-profit East Harlem Business Capital Corporation (EBHCC). Unable to stick to the schedule and raise money for the project, New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) pulled the plug on it late last year.

The Harlem Community Development Corporation has created a plan in concert with City College’s Architectural Center, Meta Brunzema’s architecture firm, and Irwin Cohen, the developer of Chelsea Market.

They propose an extended food production and retail corridor, running over a dozen blocks further north than the original marketplace. But no one will speak specifically about the plan, or whether or not the EDC is considering it.

“It is all still tentative,” says Leon Wynter, a representative of Harlem CDC. “We have ideas bouncing around.”

Since the EHBCC plan disintegrated, the Economic Development Corporation hasn’t yet given any company the green light, and will not comment on any plans they are considering at this time, if any. “We are currently working with various stakeholders and city officials,” says Janel Patterson, of the EDC. “We want to work with local people to get their input, and then invite companies to put forth proposals.”

But it doesn’t sound like much communication is occurring. Pablo Torres, of East Harlem Community Board 11, says he isn’t aware of the current status of the revitalization effort. “We’re actually writing a letter to the EDC to find out who has been designated (to develop it) at this time.”

Despite the limbo La Marqueta continues to live in, Ramon still holds out hope that a plan to bring back the beloved marketplace will be decided on soon. “It would be so great,” she says. “It was so well known. People like buying fresh things, and there aren’t many places to do that around here any longer.”