Market Street Business Proposal
I stumbled across this in the midst of my extensive research for Rebar. Here's exactly what might help spruce up the 9th and Market St. Area in San Fransicky.What they had in 1935: the Crystral Palace Market, a large, open Pike-Place Market (Seattle) style market, dependent on the individual booth rental style of ownership, and destroyed of course by a large corporation.
That was a bad move. Pike Place is still the anchor of Seattle's downtown and Belltown revival, overloved by tourists, but economically underappreciated, if anything, and it too came within a nose hair of being destroyed itself. Pike Place, how do I put this? broadcasts economic and social value to the city, providing a bridge and an amiable buffer between rich and poor sections of downtown, and proving so strong an attraction that it is difficult to actually shop there, although it still has some of the best produce and seafood in town.
I strongly suspect Crystal Palace Market did the same in its day, for example, setting sales records in 1937 (!), and I also suspect that, in a way, Market St. never fully recovered when it was torn down.
As the memory of one old fellow goes:
The downfall of the Crystal Palace came when some drugstore corporation bought it and chopped it up to put a drug store in one corner. It never looked the same again and pretty soon people stopped coming. We never went there again.Now it appears to be the home of a wholesale home furnishing center. Whee.
Eventually it was torn down so an uncharming motel could take its place.
I don't know much about economics, but I bet if the Crystal Palace Market was there today it would be one of San Francisco's top attractions... unless the people who fixed up Fisherman's Wharf got their hands on it.
I was very impressed by the revival of the Embarcadero Center, which is sort of Martha Stewart hybrid of this open market and a suburban mall, but it's more of a mall in trendy urban dress than the kind of amiable, dynamic chaos that Pike Place is. Not bad, but if anyone is handing out 40 million in redevelopment funds for the Civic Center area, hey, look backward.
posted by JAB at 12:49 PM
2 Comments:
I think you're spot on. The "Heart of the City" farmers market is held at UN Plaza (Market & 7th) on Wednesdays and Sundays and changes the whole mood of the neighborhood. Great quality, good prices and one can even buy live chickens. I have high hopes for the new farmers market in the Bayview, which needs all of the help it can get.
The granddaddy of farmers markets is the Alemany Market on Saturdays. It has a great history, started during WWII when rationing meant people in San Francisco were hungry, labor shortages slowed the canneries, a screwy wholesale consignment system hurt the farmers and the whole mess led to food going to rot people going hungry.
You can read a nice piece about the guy who started the first San Francisco farmers market and organized more than 800 victory gardens in Golden Gate Park here: http://www.seasonalchef.com/brucato.htm
John Brucato, local hero!
In my romantic economy, I see the Pike Place style as the parts of market economies I adore, like creativity, democratic culture, productivity and people benefiting from their products of their own labor as well as strong, direct competition, fair prices, and an incredible diversity of goods. Pike Place itself has its limitations, but it really is vitality embodied.
The Crystal Palace and Pike Place, with the protection of their permanent locations, were true centers of the community without requiring heavy management, until the last few decades- in Seattle, a commission had to be created to save it, and rules put in place to deny access to chains and franchises. The result was the crucible that produced Starbucks (tolerated at Pike Place only in its original form.)
I suspect that the Farmer's markets are usually only tolerated because they are somewhat temporary. God forbid we'd actually organize modern centers of shopping like this: small owners, extremely diverse, heavily competetive, partly protected from franchises in recognition of the tremendous social value.
Small open markets, with heavy competition within, but protected from Amalgamation and Capital, are amazingly powerful, and it should be said, liberating culturally and socially. This became evident when I made the horrible mistake of visiting the Southcenter Mall the other day, which, partly because of it relentlessly sterile design but mostly that unrelieved strip of the same, the same, the same national chains, proceeded to suck all the joy of life out of me.
We've traded in markets accessible to ordinary people for a sort of transnational rule by amalgamation and capital (kudos to Deadwood for bringing back that phrase). The result: a culture dominated by nationalized marketing, oligopolistic production but commodified labor.
(Kudos also to the internet for providing a real alternative for about ten years - that'll be over soon, due to, say it, Amalgamation and Capital. And it should be noted the Internet was a commons made possible only by government-led development, and that I think is the nut of the thing: we crave the Commons, almost in our hearts.)
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