To Market, To Market

This Saturday, I visited DC's Eastern Market. It was perfect weather for a walk around Capitol Hill and a morning of shopping outdoors. I wanted to make sure to visit this month, though, because the market has been suffering since its historic 1873 building had a terrible fire on April 30th. It's one of the places in DC that I'll miss most when I move.

Going to a public market has an appeal to it that a shopping mall will never capture. In some markets, being outdoors is one part of the allure, but so is interacting directly with the people who make, grow, or at least select their own merchandise. It also feels like a bit of a step back in time, since people have been selling goods this way for centuries.

Two of my favorite places from past visits to Philly are historic public markets. The city's Italian market claims to be "the oldest and largest working outdoor market in the United States," and I'm excited to be able to go there more often. Reading Terminal Market is a bit closer to where I'll be living and is historic in its own right; it apparently evolved out of an outdoor mess of stalls along what became Market Street.

I discovered that a fellow GW American Studies program alum has published a book called Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America that explores how markets were key to the development of shared community values. The book focuses on New York and Philadelphia, but I think the recent fire at Eastern Market has demonstrated how central the space was to the community here in DC.

The community isn't just about the people that come to the markets; it's about the vendors interacting with their customers. The Slow Food movement (part of which is focused on buying local) calls this "linking producers and co-producers." I think I'll go eat some of the cherries I "co-produced" right now, in fact.