Marketplaces Find a Way

THOUGH HISTORY HASN’T ALWAYS BEEN KIND, BUTCHERS, BREWERS, AND BAKERS STILL THRIVE AT URBAN MARKETS.

- M. NOLAN GR AY

ACROSS NORTH AMERICA, local boosters are whisking visitors off to places like Detroit’s beloved Eastern Market or Milwaukee’s Public Market. An eager local guide will take them to Portland’s food truck corrals or Vancouver’s Granville Island. A more reluctant host may let them tag along for a Spam musubi lunch at Honolulu’s Maunakea Marketplace or to pick through mid-century modern furniture at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, California.

Midway through a cross-country trip, the monotony of my hosts’ ideas for how best to spend a day in their city started to wear on me. Yes, yes, your city has a great food hall, a great farmer’s market, a great peddlers mall—as does every other city. But then it dawned on me that this is as it should be. Marketplaces are urban spaces par excellence, places that allow us to relish in the hustle, to see and be seen by strangers, to enjoy, as Pericles put it, all the good things of this Earth that flow into the city.

Adam Smith understood this when he suggested that man has a natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.” Smith was trying to explain why markets tend to emerge wherever more than one human being can be found. We don’t spend our free time rifling through yard sales, haggling over prices, or promenading in malls because we have to—we do it because it’s inherent to who we are. 

DEFYING AN UNKIND NARRATIVE

TODAY, THE TERM