Peter Harnik<nemwi@ids2.idsonline.com>, co-founder of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, is presently a visiting fellow with the Northeast-Midwest Institute working on a nationwide celebration of cities. His address is: 218 "D" St. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003; Phone: 202-546-2530.
- provided through OPENAIR-MARKET NET
It's hard to imagine a better place to hold a national conference on Public Markets and Community Revitalization than in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly vending.
Front and center is the Reading Terminal Market, one of the truly memorable, wonderful urban spaces and human scenes in the nation--a maelstrom of sights, sounds, smells, colors, accents, complexions, all with the human stomach as the bottom line. The Public Markets conference took place directly next door at the humongous, new Philadelphia Convention Center (called, technically, the Pennsylvania Convention Center--I can only speculate as to what bizarre financial and political dealing led to that nomenclature!), allowing participants the opportunity to sneak out during slower moments for baklava, ribs, lox, Amish cakes, carrot-and-beet juice, a bunch of fresh arugula, stilton cheese, a veggie burger, or Lord knows what else. For those who ate at tables within the market, one of the lunchtime entertainment acts was a jazz band consisting of lawyers and a sitting Philly judge.
Reading Terminal, for all its pizzazz, is not the most amazing market in Philadelphia. That honor would have to go to the Italian Market, an open-air street mart that harkens directly to Florence, Naples or Rome (except that about half the vendors are, by now, Asian). Fish, squid, clams, pigs snouts, ox tails, chinese cabbage, kiwis, and hundreds of other food items, household goods and cheap chachkas are piled high under collapsing awnings along a litter-strewn street in a venerable Italian neighborhood only a mile from City Hall. Staring down on merchants and shoppers alike is a huge, building-sized mural of the late Frank Rizzo, former strong-arm police commissioner and segregationist mayor of the city. When we visited, the locals were warding off the morning chill with trash fires burning in 55-gallon drums at 100-foot intervals down the street, creating a scene straight from a Jacques Louis David painting during the French Revolution.
And there are even more markets, all within the city limits of Philadelphia. In the city's tony northwest we saw and sampled the upscale Chestnut Hill Market and the new Manayunk Farmers Market, the magnet that is leading to the gentrification and redevelopment of a quaint canalside neighborhood. Nearby, in down-at-the-heels Germantown, the 100-year-old Germantown Market is helping to provide good food and community solidarity to a struggling neighborhood. And another conference group visited the Firehouse Farmers Market near the University of Pennsylvania, a private venture utilizing an abandoned historic stone fire station.
For those of us who could resist our passion for eating food and watching throngs of people, the conference itself provided plenty of interest and even some fireworks--at one point a group of market purists erupted into a debate over the appropriateness of including "festival" marketplaces in the family of markets. (Festival markets, created by innovative urban architect Jane Thompson and the Rouse Company at Faneuil Hall in Boston and on Baltimore's harborfront, have become increasingly formulaic and have spread to numerous other locations around the country. In doing so, they have gradually lost some of their luster as well as their profitability; several have actually gone bankrupt.)
As a matter of fact, from the very first audience question at the opening plenary, the conferees struggled to define "public markets." Plenary emcee Fred Kent, president of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, gave his definition--"they are entities which are controlled by a non-profit corporation, which build local economies using local and nearby resources, and which are more than simply farmers' markets." Other attendees, however, pointed out that some successful public markets are privately owned and operated; others felt that farmers' markets were appropriately included as public markets. (In California the movement is so advanced that facilities must be certified to call themselves farmer's markets, and farmers must be certified in order to participate; in Washington State, a facility must have at least five farmers to call itself a farmers' market.) Another movement leader, Hilary Baum, principal with Public Market Partners, gave a simpler, broader and vaguer definition: "Public markets express public goals and work toward them."
Whatever they are, America seems to love them; the number of public markets is growing at a phenomenal rate of between eight and 14 percent per year (compared with less than two percent per year for supermarkets). There are today over 2400 public markets, up from 100-or-so 20 years ago, according to Roberta Gratz, author of "The Living City" and the soon-to-be published "Downtown: Getting it Right by Doing it Wrong." In her eloquent presentation, Gratz bemoaned the rise of the automobile-dominated suburb--"The garage door has replaced the front door; the underground garage has replaced the office building lobby; the parking lot has replaced the steps to City Hall"--and celebrated the return of public markets to the urban economic and cultural scene. (Another speaker, when asked if public markets were a new phenomenon, replied that they are "6000 years young.")
The holy-of-holies of this movement is Seattle's Pike Place Market, the almost-mythical facility that has simultaneously saved downtown Seattle from large-scale urban removal, preserved the livlihoods of dozens of small farmers and fishermen, pumped big bucks into the Seattle tourist economy, provided inexpensive food, housewares and other goods to low-income downtown residents, spawned a profitable tourist-oriented craft industry, supported a cadre of street musicians, and provided a nurturing network of social safety net programs to people who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
According to the U.S. Economic Development Administration, Pike Place is "the single most successful project of all time as measured by its success in turning a one-time governmental investment into long-term jobs." Aaron Zaretsky, former head of Pike Place's supporting foundation, reported that a $55 million governmental investment in the market has resulted in $100 million worth of annual sales by 350 permanent merchants (100 of whom are small farmers), the generation of $650 million in private development in the immediate area around the market, and the construction of 1500 new downtown apartments.
Oh yes, and one other feather. One of the single-stall micro-enterprise at Pike Place was Starbucks Coffee, today one of the giant arbiters of yuppy taste. (Which presents an interesting dilemma, since the rules of Pike Place forbid any chain enterprises. I did not learn whether Starbucks was booted out of Pike Place or given a grandfather clause waiver.)
Public market purists like Kent, Gratz, Baum and Zaretsky stressed that markets must serve the needs of their local clientele--not the high-priced desires of wealthy tourists. The best markets will, by being true to their communities, also attract tourists. ("For markets," said Gratz, "the mantra is not 'location, location, location'--it's 'local, local, local.'") In contrast, today's interchangeable festival markets are all geared to upper-income shoppers who've come to expect the standard fare of Victoria's Secret, Gap, Banana Republic, Nature Company, Brentano, etc. (One attendee suggested the motto: "You've been to one festival market, you've been to them mall!")
Besides local authenticiy, another possible explanation for the burgeoning growth of markets is that people go to them for more than just shopping. According to one study, just 26 percent of market-goers said they went to "shop," compared to 94 percent of those heading purposefully off to shopping malls. Interestingly, in the final analysis, people spend, on the average, more on a public market spree than on a shopping center outing.
Who makes up the nation's public market advocates? Judging from a cursory glance at the conference registration and listening to two days of sessions, I would say there is a heavy influence of New Yorkers, former New Yorkers and, interestingly, of Jews. (This contrasts rather dramatically with the movement that I know best--the rails-to-trails movement of those converting abandoned rail corridors into bike paths. Although trails advocates seem to be demographically, sociologically and politically similar to this marketeers, the former is overwhelmingly non-Jewish and much more rooted in the Midwest.)
Being a Jewish former New Yorker myself, I'm not surprised by this observation. Public markets are quintessentially urban artifacts -- they virtually require a dense population to survive economically, with New York being at the far end of the spectrum -- and Jews (like Italians) are quintessentially urban dwellers as well as born merchandisers. Public markets are, after all, merely miniature versions of the city itself--the coming together of people for commerce, exchange, information, excitement and, yes, even intimacy. (As an enthusiast of both bicycles and markets, I was thrilled to discover the Manayunk Market which is located directly alongside the Philadelphia-to-Valley Forge rail-trail, half way between the Liberty Bell and Valley Forge.)
Is the burgeoning success of public markets a sign that cities themselves may be on the verge of a comeback? We'll see. Sure, 98 percent of Americans still prefer the antiseptic predictability, convenience and inexpensiveness of suburban supermarkets and malls, but that growth curve is almost flat and the industry is starting to look back worriedly over its shoulder. Public Markets may be one sign that Americans are looking beyond assembly-line mass culture to a sense of old-fashioned, meaningful community. Give me another pound of humus.
Return to the Reports page of the 3rd International Public Market Conference