Pike Place Market: What Nineteen Aught Seven Looks Like When It Survives

The farmers showed up before the market did. In the summer of nineteen aught seven, city council passed an ordinance allowing farmers to sell directly to consumers at a designated spot at the top of Pike Street where it meets First Avenue. The idea was blunt: middlemen had been marking up food prices at will, and the city wanted to cut them out. On the first market day in August of nineteen aught seven, eight farm wagons showed up. Within a week, the market drew seven hundred farmers and crowds that blocked traffic for blocks.

For sixty-four years, the market thrived, declined, was neglected, and finally faced demolition. Urban renewal reached Seattle in the nineteen sixties with the same proposal it brought to neighborhoods across the country: clear the old and build new. The Pike Place Market was scheduled for the clear pile. In nineteen seventy-one, Seattle voters passed a ballot measure, by roughly a two to one margin, that created the Pike Place Market Historical District and blocked demolition. The same year, a coffee company called Starbucks opened its first location on Pike Place. The fish-throwing that tourists photograph today began in nineteen eighty-six when fishmongers at the Pike Place Fish Market started hurling purchases across the counter to make the work faster. The Gum Wall, which management periodically scrapes and has called a public health hazard, dates to nineteen ninety-three when theater patrons began sticking gum to the alley wall while waiting for shows.

The market is now a National Historic Landmark. It is also, genuinely, a working farmers market. Roughly two hundred fifty farmers, craftspeople, and small-business owners still hold stalls. The tourists and the locals and the halibut flying through the air have coexisted for decades. The ordinance from nineteen aught seven is still doing its job.