The DC Public Market System

Browsing at Eastern Market

DC awoke this morning to the sad news that Eastern Market was significantly damaged in a large fire last night.  It's too early to tell what will happen at Eastern Market, but as someone who has spent many happy hours poking around the market and eating delicious breakfasts, I certainly hope it can be rebuilt.

Given the damage at Eastern Market, and the continuing gaping hole that is the O Street Market here in Shaw, I thought I'd see what the tubes of the internets could provide by way of background on these markets.

The late 1800's was when the DC public market system seems to have developed.  Eastern Market was built in 1873 and the O Street Market was built in 1881.  Center Market, located at 7th & Pennsylvania Ave NW, was built in 1871 and apparently covered two city blocks (the link has some good pictures via the Smithsonian) before being replaced by the National Archives.  Numerous sources explain that the market system developed as railroads made it easier to bring in foodstuffs from the country and were the precursors to our modern supermarkets.  The Center Market apparently had at least 700 stalls with merchants selling food and other goods from around the region and around the country.  The Center Market closed in 1931 to make way for the Archives and a number of the vendors spread to the other markets, as well as to the Northern Liberties Market (at 5th & K NW).  The Victorian Secrets site has a great post about the movement out of the Center Market and the creation of a building across the street from the Northern Liberties Market.

[An interesting side note: apparently the areas north of downtown Washington, DC used to be known as the "Northern Liberties" which generally included any unsettled land on the north side of Washington.  The Northern Liberties Market was built in 1846 and was the site of a riot in 1857 that involved a "borrowed" cannon which resulted in six deaths.  All via the Historical Society's website.]

That brings me back to the O Street Market.  As many in the neighborhood already know, there is a current attempt to redevelop the O Street Market into a usable, contributing piece of our neighborhood.  The market was in active use until the riot in 1968 when it closed for a while.  The next few decades brought various attempts to revive the market, including the building of the Giant Supermarket.  Unsurprisingly, the arrival of the Giant made it difficult to develop a functioning food market in the O Street building.  The market closed in 2000 after further attempts at development, and then a snow storm in 2003 caused the roof and a significant portion of the building to collapse.  Today, as reported in DC North, there seems to be movement toward a redevelopment of the entire block, including a new Giant in the space formerly occupied by the market which hopes to break ground in 2008.  I certainly hope that this new project adds as much to the community as the old market did and as Eastern Market has done over the years on Capitol Hill.