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- Seattle’s Pike Place Market
Thriving for Nearly 100 Years
- By Bill McNutt
Ohio Correspondent
- Seattle’s Pike Place Market could arguably be the country’s premier farmers’ market. Closing in on 100 years of operation, few markets have gone on as long in the same location as Pike Place and made as significant contribution to the city’s economy.
This top market has come a long way from its start in 1907 as a protest against the high cost of produce. Because Seattle is a Washington seacoast town, in the early part of the 20th century, much of the fresh produce had to be imported from California. What was grown by local farmers passed through the hands of wholesalers and jobbers in terminal markets, who successfully bought low and sold high.
Farmers complained about being cheated and customers were outraged by the high prices: Onions went from 10 cents to $1 a pound between 1906 and 1907 and the public was up in arms over price gouging. One city councilman, perhaps setting the stage for his reelection campaign, proposed a public street market.
Within two months the first market building opened, just in time for the typical cold and rainy Seattle winter. In the next few years the location assumed the structure it has today – a long covered arcade occupying numerous city blocks, open every day and jammed with over 500 market stalls. The market now encompasses nine acres, making it one of the largest, if not the largest such market in the country.
On opening day in late summer of 1907, eight farmers showed up at the designated First and Pike Streets site and were mobbed by 10,000 shoppers, who cleaned them out by 11 a.m. The market has continually expanded from its first location and became known as Pike Place Market.
Just before World War I the four-story main arcade was built, providing 100 market spaces. Two years later another 65 stalls, plus permanent store locations were added, and the market look was fixed much as it is today. Prior to World War II, over 25,000 people were coming to the market on weekdays, double that number on weekends. There were nearly 500 market stalls and four hotels in the immediate vicinity. Market activity barely slowed in the Depression of the 1930s, because of the lower cost food items available to those who were short of money, and places to live in nearby rooming houses and hotels.
What did almost kill the market was after Pearl Harbor, when local Japanese farmers were forced to sell out and relocate to Idaho detention centers. These growers had made up almost 80% of those manning produce stalls at one time. Those who came back to Seattle after the war and resumed farming did not return to the market, but sold to commission houses, whose reputation by this time was considerably improved, due in great part to the public market competition.
Public markets such as Pike Place were all going downhill in the 1950s and 1960s as supermarkets took over in newly flourishing suburbs. Pike Place was about to be condemned for apartments and office buildings, and of course, a mammoth parking lot. Against all odds, a “Friends of the Market” organization was formed and succeeded in getting 25,000 signatures on a petition to save the market. The referendum passed early in 1971, just prior to the national movement toward direct marketing of farm produce.
With its coastal location, the big second in sales volume comes from the sea, including many varieties of fish. Pike Place Market has become a tourist mecca. Anything bought in the market can be shipped anywhere in the continental U.S. Any variety of fish can be freeze-packed and shipped anywhere, sometimes even designated as catch of the day by the sender. Pike Place Market attracted nine million visitors last year, many of them tourists.
There are 550 businesses in the market including 200 day stalls, table spaces occupied by 120 farmers and 200 craftspeople, who pay daily rent but are not there every day. Half the business locations are occupied by commercial marketers, who pay monthly rents. These include the 10 fish markets in “high stalls,” so called because mountains of fish piled high on display.
Growers at the market must raise what they sell. The value-added items, such as jams and jellies, must also contain items grown by farmers.
Today 80% of the Pike Place Market historical district is owned and managed by the Preservation and Development Authority, a non-profit entity set up for this purpose, with its own board of directors and 88 full-time employees.
Today the 120 farmers from Washington state sell a wide range of produce from Asian vegetables to “every imaginable variety of greens,” said Andrew Krueger, director of marketing for Pike Place Market. Fruit growers, some from long ways away from east of the Cascade Mountains, come and sell their fruits according to Krueger.
Krueger said that Pike Place Market attracts a mix of locals and visitors. With a downtown population of nearly 22,000 the market is ideally located to serve Seattle residents.
Pike Place Market expands even more on Wednesdays and Sundays. On Organic Wednesdays growers set up outside of the Pike Place structure under tables with retractable awnings and on Sundays the street is blocked off and growers are put into the street, which eases congestion, according to Krueger. These special Wednesdays and Sundays run during the growing season from mid-June through October and have been very successful, Krueger said.
Pike Place Market is open seven days a week, year round and only closes for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
“We actually have an amazing geographic location,” said Krueger. The market is located in the far west part of downtown overlooking Puget Sound to the east and the city to the west.
“We’re lucky to be in a part of the country where shoppers place a high value on locally grown,” said Krueger.
For more information visit www.pikeplace market.org.
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