Wayback: Center Market, As It Was

We walked our dog over to eastern market early this morning. What I wouldn’t give for a market like that in PQ once more. Maybe one day F ST will have all the shops that make up a good market.

F street would make a fabulous Gourmet Row.

I love these pictures of Center Market. It’s hard to imagine this was in the neighborhood.

Excellent post on the history of our neighborhood.

Excellent old photos! My new idea is to bury 7th Street [going underground at the hill b/t D & E streets & popping back up at K], converting 7th Street to a pedestrian only mall, & having a market there seven days a week, a la Grafton Street in Dublin or the Strøget in København…
you could even have underground access from a buried 7th Street to the parking garages, the V Center, the metro, etc.
now that would be awesome…

I heard a rumor that there were slave auctions at the site of the Central Market. Was anything about this mentioned in the sources you researched?

actually, the dean and deluca in georgetown used to be the western market in that system. back in the day, they had 75 vendors there (i think). so it may not be a market like eastern market, but the building *is* still standing. all the rest have been torn down or just have a remnant facade still standing.

Didn’t there used to be a Dean and DeLuca over by the Warner? It closed a couple of years ago.

in response to a few comments, see below…

poo poo – thanks for the add’l info. to give readers a sense of the size of the Center Market…it had 57,500 square feet of interior space with most vendors inside and some outside. Eastern Market has approx. 10,000 square feet of interior space.

here’s a good reference from the Project for Public Spaces:
Public Markets and the City: A Historical Perspective

PQ Observer – nothing I read indicated slaves were traded at Center Market. the trading of slaves was abolished on Sept 20, 1850 in Washington DC under the Compromise of 1850. the existence of slavery itself was fully abolished on April 16, 1862 by Abraham Lincoln in the form of the DC Emancipation Act predating the national Emancipation Proclamation by 9 months. Center Market didn’t start up until 1871.

here’s a good reference from politico.com:
Congress bans slave trade in D.C. – Sept. 20, 1850

adolph-cluss.org is the most depressing website, it really shows how much beautiful elaborate architecture was razed back in the day. the other day i saw the inside of the franklin school. wow, what an incredible decrepit building.

pqresident and PQ observer:

While Center Market wasn’t built until 1871, the area was home to “Marsh Market”. Marsh Market began at the turn of the 19th century as a small collection of sheds where traders sold goods. They brought there goods into the city center via the canal that ran where Constitution Avenue is now. The canal often flooded up to Pennsylvania Avenue–hence the name Marsh Market. The site was home to regular slave auctions before 1850.

P.S. I should source my previous post. Check out these two books for more information:

“The Secret Architecture of Our Nation ‘s Capital” by David Ovason

and

“Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L’Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission” by Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee

thanks Andy in PQ for the additional historical information! we do appreciate it.

at some point, we hope to do another Wayback Machine post and take a look at some of the maps from the 19th and 20th century that illustrate the changes in our neighborhood that have occurred over time.