Center Market, Washington, DC (Part 2): The Not-So-Glamorous Complement

(Image above, Dejeuner sur l' Herbe, Washington, DC ca. 1870. Rats were a major problem for DC city planners in downtown's early days).


Immediately after the last posting, my attorney* advised me to figure out how to combine my illustrations with this blog. Before legal counsel, I was going to write about the "pestiferous" historic conditions around the market, and how this figured into public thinking about a market downtown. Post-counsel, I tried to sum up the issue cartoon-style.

During most of the 19th century, butchers regularly dumped poultry innards, rotted fish and animal carcasses into a canal that used to run alongside B Street. The canal path is now Constitution Avenue. This was covered up in 1871 when a pipe was installed to make the canal into a real sewer.

This was a hugely significant complement to a modern, grand market on the Mall. For decades, the market was a growing eyesore, a "squatty" mess, completely inappropriate for a national capital in-the-making.

An account from 1870:

"the present old rookery embraces within its struggling circuit of sheds a sort of barn-yard where horses and vehicles are coralled on market days, and which yard is delightfully paved with manure, floating straw, dead kittens, rotten eggs, stinking fish, and rubbish of all sorts, it does not follow that a bill may be wholly objectionable that fails to perpetuate this feature of our unique market."

The Adolf Cluss-designed Center Market replaced squalor with splendor, and provided the right kind of backdrop for Washington's image-conscious social elite -- as well as a central shopping venue for millions of ordinary citizens and tourists.

* my fiance, Henry

Center Market, Washington, DC (Part 1): Chicken Punching in our Nation's Capitol

(Image: Shopping at Center Market, Theodor Horydczak, 1920s, Theodor Horydczak Collection, Library of Congress, LC-H814-T-1030 DLC).

Buying groceries downtown was part of the original plan for Washington, DC, back when the District was a swamp and George Washington still had something to do with the capital city's urban planning decisions.

Center Market's demolition in 1930 to make way for the National Archives building marked a critical tipping point in the District's quality of life, at least in its central downtown.

This entry is the first in a series looking into why DC lost Center Market, without a replacement. Unpopularity wasn't a reason.

All the President's Meats

On March 2, 1797, "Center Market" was established in a two-acre square around what is now 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue. In its early days, the federal government took keen interest in the quality and cost of food sold locally, and this Center Market was the primary source of produce and meat for DC's early urban residents. Including its Presidents.

President Grant was, according to local reports well over 50 years after his presidency, very interested in the market downtown and shopped for himself when he was in the mood, as did Chester A. Arthur, Franklin Pierce and William Henry Harrison. The latter died after only a month in office, but apparently frequented the market throughout that month.

William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, three-time Democratic presidential nominee, and inventor of the "stump tour" alledgedly took early evening walks up Pennsylvania Avenue with a market-purchased bunch of celery sticking out of his pocket. (Sunday Star, September 9, 1951 and Washington Herald, December 29, 1936).

Scenic Washington

Buying groceries downtown was, by contemporary accounts, a scene. When the building and its function were threatened with demolition, local papers painted glamorous portraits of grocery-buying there in olden days.

"... General McCawley never missed a day (at the market), his footman behind him, a huge market basket on each arm. Here, on a wintry day, he might encounter Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Leiter, each wrapped in a raccoon coat, followed by the chauffeur and the footman, likewise fur-coated, laden with baskets piled high with every good thing that the market afforded."

"In that leisurely era, there was always time for a chat and a gossip with friends between trying to decide upon the relative merits of halibut or salmon ... or knowingly punching the breastbone of a chicken to determine whether "spring" was a misnomer or not." (Washington Herald, July 30, 1928)

Fur coat wearing chicken punchers were already an entertaining anachronism in 1928 when supermarkets were starting to dominate conventions about how and where to buy food.

But what about those "golden years" when the market was more than a quickly fading memory? It attracted residents throughout the city, tourists from around the world and was, in its day, completely conventional. Public markets were ubiquitous when the details of what DC would be were being worked out.

One writer in the 1920s noted that had the building been a different color and style (it was red and Victorian, more on this later), it might have stood a chance.

The next installment of Ate Past will consider what really killed DC's Center Market.

O Street Market, DC: Great Expectations

Conspicuously dilapidated, clearly historic, and located near a number of housing projects, O Street Market at 7th and O Street in Washington, DC is the kind of project an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student would write their thesis about. O Street Market could easily illustrate the history of DC's Shaw neighborhood, DC's race relations and housing issues, and its urban renewal goals.

But I'm supposed to be blogging about food politics. And my attorney (also my fiance) advises me to be brief, like bloggers do, not long and lecturey, like someone who was once an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student.

The New Old Market

The 1881 market's heyday was in the 1930s and 40s, according to reports from the 1970s. It fronts a major historic route to Maryland farms. According to one account in the late 1970s, produce stalls once lined 7th Street on market days from O Street Market all the way to Florida Avenue (north by several blocks). Today, that's a pretty bleak stretch.

O Street Market has been on the verge of rehabilitation for a while now. It's part of a bigger plan for the site.

http://www.roadsidedevelopment.com/admin/Editor/f1l3s/rd_oSt_marketing.pdf

This plan involves tearing down a Giant supermarket on the other side of the two-block lot, and adding a hotel, rental and senior housing, and condominiums. In the plan, the historic market is a landmark cornerstone, and the market function on the site (in the Giant, to be demolished) is incorporated into the older building.

In general, most everyone is excited about the project. Concerns include the scale of the new development relative to the context, restoring 8th Street (a part of the L'Enfant plan) which was erased in the late 1970s site plan and gentrification issues. The project's architect, Shalom Baranes Associates, has incorporated preservation officials' feedback into the design.

Community Feedback

Can O Street be compared to Capitol Hill's Eastern Market? O Street's rehab has been delayed for some time while Eastern Market was quickly rehabbed after an April 2007 fire. Given Shaw's challenges, and the history of the site, a fairer comparison -- at least when thinking about the ultimate impact of the project -- might be the larger-scale CityVista, a multiuse development in the nearby Mount Vernon Triangle neighborhood.

Though that site doesn't include a landmark building, the overall idea and neighborhood concerns and needs are much more similar to Shaw's than Capitol Hill's. Capitol Hill's public Eastern Market has been in continuous operation since 1873. O Street Market's history has been up and down, and tied into urban renewal plans for Shaw (more on this below).

CityVista's program, including a large grocery store function, (http://www.cityvistadc.com/f_index.php) shows how this scale of development might work in the Shaw neighborhood. CityVista is still very new -- it opened last year -- but a review of blogs focused on living in downtown DC suggests CityVista's Safeway is now the supermarket downtown.

Historic Politics

Forty years ago, development ideas about O Street Market attempted to balance the needs and desires of new (more affluent, white) residents with the needs of existing residents. (Note: Shaw is historically multiracial and middle class with some pockets of poor residents). The building's developer in the late 1970s, James Adkins, proposed flood lights to make new white residents feel comfortable shopping on O Street. This was no simple ribbon cutting.

O Street Market stood closed for over a decade after the April 1968 riots following Martin Luther King's assassination. The Giant was the District's first new supermarket after the riots. ("Old-Style Markets Return," Washington Post, November 29, 1970).

The historic market's reopening, along with the Giant, made many very optimistic. Reporting about the two markets in the late 1970s and 1980 was a mix of nostalgia and ideas about what Shaw needed to do well.

Unfortunately, the good late-1970s ideas for O Street's rehab (including a proposal for a neighborhood kitchen and culinary training) didn't come together exactly as planned. Sales were less than brisk. A 1994 shooting inside the market, resulting in the death of a 15 year old, and 8 wounded, left sales even scanter, and vendors packed up for other markets. The shooting dominated reporting about the historic building after that, even in more recent reports about Roadside Development's plan. The building's roof fell in after a snowstorm in 2003. It's now gutted and fenced off.

As a Shaw resident, I'm maintaining optimism about O Street Market. It's a complicated project, but certainly well worth the wait.

Ate Past: Food, History and Politics

Last month, on a Friday afternoon at 0 and 9th Streets, I thought I heard gunshots. Then I thought I heard sirens. Then I went outside, and saw neighbors looking over toward flashing police cars, and swarms of cops, so asked someone what happened.

He said, "somebody got hit."

I asked, "Hit, someone was hit?"

He said, "somebody got hit."

I wondered if someone had been hit by a car or in a fist fight. I asked another neighbor what happened.

He said, "someone was shot."

Oh.

Turned out, two people had been shot that Friday near the Giant Supermarket on 9th and O Street. I shop there nearly everday. I've been told it's actually pretty safe, and that violence there is generally targeted, gang-related and professional.

That said, I wish buying groceries nearby didn't involve calculated risks.

****

I live on O Street, between 9th and 10th Street NW, in Washington, DC's Shaw neighborhood. More precisely, I live in Naylor Court, which has its own distinct identity. I'm an architectural historian, a writer, an illustrator, and was recently a lobbyist. I think I'm still certified. I don't think it matters. Earlier this year, I made a decision to return to my roots after lobbying for nearly five years with grassroots interests for historic preservation.

I also like food. A lot. My mom was a terrible cook, so I learned how to work a kitchen at an early age. I started with grilled cheese around 1975 and moved on from there.

For six years, I was a freelance writer while working for preservation and history nonprofits in Seattle, which is an excellent, formative place for foodies. When I moved to DC in 2004, culture shock was acute, in part because I wore pantyhose on a regular basis after years of wearing jeans to work, and in part because of DC's food culture.

Seattle's Pike Place Market is iconic, historically, but it's also an inexpensive place to get fresh produce, meat, fish, and other basics in the middle of the workday. DC used to have that, and when the city lost its downtown market to its federal presence in 1930, many were peeved. But not enough.

*****

About a month ago, after the aforementioned shootings and years of consideration, I started researching the politics of food through building and neighborhood history. My first subject: the historic O Street Market, which is on the other side of Giant's parking lot. This posting serves as an introduction to a series of posts featuring what I've learned about that market and others in DC, including the history of street vendors, private markets, local farming, farm routes, and food politics generally.