West Side Market: Cleveland's Cathedral of Commerce
Near Cleveland, Ohio
The clock tower you can see in the Ohio City neighborhood belongs to the West Side Market, and the building underneath it has been feeding Cleveland continuously since November second, nineteen twelve.
A public market had operated on that corner since eighteen forty, first the Pearl Street Market, a simpler structure that served the city's early immigrant communities. By the early nineteen hundreds Cleveland had grown into one of the most ethnically diverse industrial cities in America, and the old market was not equal to what the city had become. Mayor Tom L. Johnson pushed through funding for a new building, and the firm of Hubbell and Benes spent five years designing what would be the last of Cleveland's great public market houses.
The result cost six hundred eighty thousand dollars and announced itself with a hundred-and-thirty-seven-foot clock tower. Inside, a vaulted ceiling rises forty-four feet over a concourse with a hundred vendor stalls; outside, an arcade runs along two sides with eighty-five additional stands. The materials were brick, granite, and glazed tile, fireproof, easy to clean, designed to last. Seth Thomas made the clock. Natural lighting and ventilation were built into the design from the start, with a separate fish market at the east end to keep the smell from traveling.
The market became the anchor of the Ohio City neighborhood and a living record of Cleveland's immigrant waves. Polish butchers, Slovak bakers, Greek produce vendors, Lebanese grocery stands, Puerto Rican prepared-food stalls, the demographics of the vendors shifted with the decades, but the market itself never closed. Today roughly a hundred vendors operate inside, and the market draws an average of one-point-two million visitors a year.
In nineteen seventy-three it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In two thousand eight the American Planning Association named it one of ten great public spaces in America. On any Saturday morning, with the vendors calling out and the smells layering from the fish stalls to the bakeries to the flower stands, that designation is easy to believe.
