Eastern Market reeks. One step inside the door and it hits, wafting off of the exiting patrons. Somehow they’ve carried an odor that can only be conjured up by a mingling of distinguishable smelly things. Fish, irises and raw meat lay claim on the nostrils of newcomers.
Then, depending on who walks by, the entering shopper is struck by scents as diverse as the crowd inside. There’s the elderly couple with a bag full of cheese that a virgin nose might tag as goat. There’s a young mother fending off scurvy from her kids with a bundle of citrus and there are the newlyweds with a few links of sausage from Canales Quality Meats for a Labor Day barbecue.
Since a fire destroyed the historic market on April 30th of this year, community support has rallied behind the “Capital of Capitol Hill,” setting the stage for another installment in the long line of comeback stories Eastern Market has authored in its 200 year history.
This place, located at 7th Street and North Carolina Avenue SE, should really forewarn its clientele of sensory overload. A flute’s music follows people through the door from the flutist on the sidewalk out front. “Classical music, man,” he said shrugging his shoulders. “Might be Bach? Might be Handel?” He’s as unsure of the composer as a new shopper is unsure of what goat cheese smells like.
The vendors sell themselves with friendly chatter that permeates the conversations between family, friends and strangers who convene in front of stands. An air conditioner hums, blasting cold air on those who are lucky enough to be standing in the middle of the market, which just so happens to be the loudest and most crowded place in the building.
The $1.6 million tent that houses these dozen or so meeting places features an intensely white roof that amplifies the sunlight from outside and shocks the eyes of incomers. It resembles a giant green house and creates enough heat in early September to make you believe it is.
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On the first day of May this year, Eastern Market provided the scene for a much different kind of sensory overload. Tears flowed as cameras rolled, capturing the moment when longtime lovers of the market mourned the loss of their meeting place and unofficial community center.
A fire had gutted the original “Capital of Capitol Hill,” taking with it the stands and tools necessary to sustain business for the vendors. No one was hurt—the fire took place in the middle of the night—but the overflow of emotion witnessed by Stephen Ackerman, a Capitol Hill resident and Eastern Market scholar who is publishing a book on the market, suggested otherwise.
“It shocked people how much they cared,” Ackerman said of the community’s reaction to the disaster. “People were in tears on the streets and hugging the merchants and everything. It got people by surprise with how much people cared about this place.”
All 14 of the businesses housed inside of the 173-year-old brick building were destroyed in the blaze, which caused about $20 million worth of damages in all. It came on the same night the Georgetown community lost its library to fire, giving Mayor Adrian Fenty fits as he traveled back and forth between the sites.
Like Fenty, the rest of the community surrounding Eastern Market didn’t stand idle for long. The market had seen hard times before and this latest tragedy would be no exception.
“Even after the cameras had gone away, Fenty was around talking and listening to the people,” Ackerman said of the local government’s concern, something it had trouble garnering in the past. “It was nice because we saw he wasn’t here for a photo op. It looked like he had a comprehensive plan, which was wonderfully refreshing. This was his way of showing things were different, that the District government can move.”
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Over the last two centuries, Eastern Market has consistently dealt with threats of erasure from the District’s landscape. Every time, the surrounding community responded to bring it back.
The original Eastern Market, approved by Thomas Jefferson in 1805, was resurrected after the British invasion of 1814. It survived disruption in operations during the Civil War once Adolf Cluss—one of the city’s most renowned architects—came up with a plan for rebuilding it at the C Street location. There, it has outlasted both the chain supermarket that moved across the street in 1923 and the city government’s plan to turn the old-school market into a supermarket itself twenty years later. It has endured the riots of 1968 and the city’s plans to turn the space into a tourist bazaar during the 1980s.
This year’s fire will probably go down in the books as the most physically destructive obstacle Eastern Market has had to face since the redcoats discovered they had a distaste for fresh products and friendly service.
“It was really a community tragedy,” said Kimberly Evanson, a young mother heading a family of shoppers who have lived on the Hill for the last year. “People banded together to get it back. Actually, we probably came more often right after the fire, just to show support.”
Such support came streaming in from all directions. Since the fire, the surrounding neighborhood has raised close to half a million dollars to support the vendors and breathe life into the temporary market while Cluss’s building across the street is covered in scaffolding until Spring 2009, when it’s scheduled to reopen.
Mayor Fenty couldn’t drop six figures of his own money to get the vendors back into the swing of things, but he did help by providing tax exemptions and suspending rent payments for the merchants. His actions broke from the tradition where government officials had tried to make Eastern Market something it wasn’t. Previous mayors might have jumped at the chance April’s fire would have presented them, razing the building altogether or reopening it as a supermarket or children’s theatre.
“They finally realized that the market brings in money,” Ackerman said. “When they had to close down, everyone in the area was doing less business. Plus, it creates a sense of life. It draws people there. I think people were slow to appreciate it.”
The Capitol Hill neighborhood raised money and awareness through their website, saveeasternmarket.com. T-shirts were sold and donations made, sometimes in lieu of actually purchasing goods from the vendors themselves.
But the fire’s effect on the market was two-sided. The destruction was obvious, but it gave to the market something it had been lacking in the past: advertising.
“We’re getting advertised in the paper and on television,” Jack Cully, longtime vendor at Bowers Fancy Dairy Products said. “When we were across the street, no one even knew we were there. Finally all this had to happen. The place burned down, and now everybody knows where this is.”
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The fire has led to an influx of new shoppers to the historically diverse market, according to market regulars. From the goods sold, to the vendors selling them and the patrons shopping, every color, shape and size is represented at Eastern Market. In part it is a product of the neighborhood in which it resides, which has always been a haven of racial diversity.
“Back when the city was racially segregated, the real estate ads had ‘colored housing,’ ‘white housing’ and ‘Capitol Hill,” said Ackerman. “The market has been the heart of this community. It’s the one place where rich, poor, prominent and obscure people went and mingled. It’s where they went to gossip for over 200 years.”
Now people from all over the city—not just the regulars—are traveling to C Street to buy their groceries. Suburbanites and college students are flocking to the market, engaging in agoramania with city slickers and politicians at the weekend meeting place.
“I’m not too loyal of a shopper,” said customer Becky Sachs as she purchased some yellowfin tuna. “But I’ve come by before the fire and now after and it’s very much the same. It’s the same vendors and a lot of the same people. They’re the ones who make it.”
Jenny Foldvary (CAS ’08) is a Georgetown senior who has made it a point to get her groceries from the market since her days as a freshman.
“I heard it was one of the things you have to do as a Georgetown student living in D.C.,” said Foldvary, who was inspired by the market to produce a documentary about the place in her American Civilization III class. “Most of us consider D.C. as our new home for four years. So it’s a really interesting way to integrate yourself into the community.”
There’s even a new generation of Eastern Market shopper. They’re the ones on dad’s shoulders or lounging in strollers. They sip just-squeezed yellow lemonade, smiles plastered on their cherubic faces. The ones that can speak ask for ham and turkey and cheese and cookies for lunch. Why not? A day at the market is probably the one day you can push mom’s limits.
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“It’s cu-min,” Jack Cully bellowed from behind the counter at Bowers’ Fancy Dairy Products. “Not hu-man, or Cu-ban. It’s cuuu-min.”
“I’m not really sure what it is, but it makes the cheese taste good,” Cully said as he doled out another free sample to a white-haired patron. The Bowers’ establishment was one of the lucky stands that was able to stay in business after the fire. Planting themselves outside of the burned building and waiting for the new tent to be constructed, they set up on the sidewalk and kept coming to work.
“Before they built this place [the tent], we were outside for four months,” said Cully, barricaded behind a wall of new refrigerators leased out to the businesses by the city. “We were working out of a cooler. What a pain in the ass that was, jeez. Now we don’t have to screw around anymore. Everything is right here.”
Not all vendors were so lucky. Places like Market Poultry—where Marvin Inman has been selling chicken and Thanksgiving turkeys to the same families for 50 years—and Southern Maryland Seafood, owned by the Glascow family since 1939, were forced to wait for the new tent to be opened before they could restart their businesses.
“Today seems slow to me,” said Richard Glascow, one of the brothers who now runs Southern Maryland Seafood. The Glascow family helped keep the market from going under in the early 1960s, supporting the only two stands housed by Eastern Market when others wouldn’t. They resisted change from developers who wanted to make Eastern Market anything but a market and are a major reason the market exists as it does today.
“We’ve been out of business for four months,” Glascow said. “People are creatures of habit and habits change. It’s been too long [since stands have been open] and the number of people has dwindled. We’re fortunate because it’s really hard to get good seafood in this city. It will just have to build and come back.”
With the District’s support, positive guidance from the city’s brass and a Rocky-like propensity for comebacks, Eastern Market is poised to build up a patronage that may supercede its popularity at the original location. The vendors have been around long enough to know their role as the heartbeat of the place that is more famous for the experience it provides than the building it fills. To that end, finding a vendor in the dumps over the fire is as hard to locate as the definition of cumin.
“So what it’ll be two years until we move back?” said Cully. “In the meantime we’re happy as hell to be in here.”
