The Market on the Square

Markets have operated on and around this block since the colonial era, when the town was laid out around a central square. The building that stands here today, the Central Market House, was constructed in eighteen eighty-eight to a design by the local architect J.A.

Dempwolf. He gave it a Romanesque Revival treatment: red brick walls, steep gable dormers, a hipped roof, and projecting front pieces that read as small towers from the street. It takes up nearly an entire city block.

Since the day it opened, the building has operated as a market without interruption. That continuity spans nearly a hundred and forty years, making it one of the oldest continuously operated farmers markets in the country. The National Register of Historic Places recognized it in nineteen seventy-eight.

On a Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday morning the building fills early. Vendors sell produce grown in the surrounding Pennsylvania Dutch farmland, meats cured in the region's German tradition, baked goods, cheeses, prepared foods, and items that have been sold here in roughly the same form for generations. The building is not a heritage attraction performing the idea of a market.

It is a working market that happens to be housed in a heritage building. The architect Dempwolf designed dozens of buildings across York in the decades around nineteen hundred. The Central Market House is the one that has remained most fully what it was always meant to be.