The Destruction of Washington Market:
Despite significant evidence of the placemaking power that markets and the "market city" hold, it's incredible to see that there are forces -- both in historic and modern times - that work towards destroying these centers of neighborhood life and commerce.
New York's Washington Market was one market that didn't make it in the face of development pressure from finance, real estate, and insurance industries.
In a chapter entitled Whose Downtown?!?, John Kuo Wei Tchen vividly paints a picture of the downtown Manhattan market district and chronicles the factors that led to its destruction:
In the 1940's and '50s, downtown "renewal" schemes ripped out the historical heart of Manhattan - the early, low-rise, mixed-used port culture buildings. Like the architects of a conquering empire, the planners of the WTC built upon a previously beloved place, a vast public gathering place called the Washington Market, which stretched over the Lower West Side. Built in 1812, the Washington Market was visited by generation after generation of New Yorkers and visitors alike.
Public markets and specialty trade districts once flourished throughout Lower Manhattan. The Washington Market was easily accessible from the streets, creating a people's commons. In 1862, butcher Thomas De Voe documented the early decades of these largely forgotten gathering places. De Voe chose this 1814 verse to express his feelings about such markets:
The place where no distinctions are,
All sects and colors mingle there,
Long folks and short, black folks and gray
With common bawds, and folks that pray,
Rich folks and poor, both old and young,
And good and bad, and weak, and strong,…
The high, the low, the proud, the meek….
Such a public space promoted a generous urban spirit of access and general well-being.
From the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century, this intermingling of diverse peoples and and cultures characterized the port city. This culture flourished in taverns, such settlements as the Five Points, the public markets, the parks, the Lower East Side, the streets, and the subways. The industries of the port and scores of manufacturers provided jobs for newcomers and old timers. Conflicts abounded, but they were of a human scale. Going out into the neighborhoods was all about boundary crossings. Dance halls, community organizations, union halls, and parks were the venues to meet fellow countrymen and new neighbors. Where else would Jimmy Cagney pick up phrases of Yiddish and Cantonese? And you didn't have to be wealthy to survive and live well in Lower Manhattan. You didn't have to attend college to be educated about the world.
But in 1956, the Washington Market was shut down. Its wholesale operations soon moved to the remote Hunts Point in the Bronx. The finance, real estate, and insurance interests prevailed, and Downtown became theirs to shape. In this sense, the destruction of Washington Market was but a recent assault on the city's historical port culture.
Source: John Kuo Wei Tchen. Whose Downtown?!? In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (2002). Pgs 37-38.
Quoted poem: Thoms De Voe, The Market Assistant, 7-8, New York Historical Society Library.
Image source: New York Public Library (originally from Gleason's pictorial drawing-room companion.)
