The buy local, farm-to-table scene in Louisville was born as the unlikely fraternal twin of modernized mass transit in the River City.
Louisville’s first freight and passenger railroad station, at the intersection of South Brook Street and East Jefferson Street, was little more than a one-story brick building with a shed roof, just big enough to keep folks out of the weather. Built in the early 1850s, the station was owned and operated by the Louisville and Frankfort Railroad. In 1881, when the railroad built new and larger rail facilities on River Road, a vacant lot was left behind. It called out for a purpose.
Over the next decade, the lot became an informal gathering place for farmers who found it a convenient location to sell produce directly to their customers. The Haymarket, as the area has been continuously called for the last 120-odd years, never sold much hay. What was available – to restauranteurs, neighborhood grocers buying in bulk, and individual shoppers known to the hucksters there as ‘curb buyers’, was an array of fresh fruits and vegetables. In 1891, when the Haymarket was formally established by the Gardeners’ and Farmers’ Market Company, these products, sold from the back of horse drawn buggies and push-carts, would have been as local as local gets.
By the time the Haymarket was incorporated, it was already Louisville’s central produce market. The area to the west of the Haymarket was also bustling with commerce; merchants and buyers of every stripe spilled into the surrounding neighborhoods. In 1898, the city declared the area bordered by South 3rd Street on the west, South Jackson Street on the east, East Market Street on the north, and East Liberty Street on the south to be a Public Market Place, with the Haymarket as the focal point. It was a bustling, vibrant affair and continued as such through the first half of the 20th century. In fat years and lean, in peacetime and wartime, Louisville businessmen, recent immigrants, laborers, hill-folk, hoboes, and “housewives of means” all found their way to the Haymarket to buy groceries.
Citing a 1919 Courier-Journal article, historian and journalist George Yater described a scene in which “‘A pretty bride from out on Cherokee Dr. [Lexington Rd.] braves the strenuous bargaining with the Italian woman at a vegetable stand and pays four cents a bunch instead of six cents’ and is whisked home in her limousine.”
Cultural diversity was as much a fixture at the Haymarket as vegetable carts, collard greens, and sow ears. A 1935 article from The Louisville Herald-Post, which speaks to typically fetishized, colonial perceptions of Middle Eastern immigrants as much as their radiant prominence in Louisville’s history, nonetheless renders the Haymarket in a vivid tableau suggestive of an open-air market plucked from the Old World and placed in a rapidly modernizing American Midwest.
“Street scene in Louisville’s Haymarket – Little Syria – a raucous bit of New York’s Ghetto. Shawled, somber garbed women claw through lush stands. Bananas. Tomatoes. Flies. Street of a thousand smells. Calico red. Gypsy blue. A Thor-lunged urchin squawls and laughs. A sloe-eyed girl with gold rings in her ears smiles with a flash of white teeth as a young, hawk-nosed fruit hustler ‘shows off.’ Inscrutable oldsters sit and watch and smoke. Above, a brassy sun in a steel-blue sky. Life swirls on in Little Syria.”
Surviving photos of the Haymarket show images such as a lanky, dour-faced white fellow in pressed slacks and a cowboy hat and a Georgia truck farmer holding an enormous cantaloupe. The Haymarket of the 1930s seems to have been a melting pot indeed of culture, time, and place.
In an inevitable and undeniably ironic turn, the same model of industrial mass transit that serendipitously made room for the Haymarket also led to its eventual decline. The advent of large chain grocery stores, whose out-of-state produce was delivered by railcar and truckload, signaled a long, slow decline in the central importance of the Haymarket.
While the Haymarket continued to support vendors and patrons, the neighborhood surrounding the actual marketplace fell on hard times. In 1948, a full scale vice-squad investigation was launched, as Mayor Charles Farnsley’s administration sought to clean up the Haymarket District that was, according to one patrician city father at least, “not safe for respectable people to go day or night.” Most residents did not consider the neighborhood to be mortally dangerous, but the cleanup continued unabated, focusing specifically on bars like the Jefferson Tavern, the Sweetheart, and Harry’s Coffee Shop, which was given the unfortunate moniker of “The Hobo’s Pendennis Club.”
These and other establishments were frequently cited for infractions like blacking out or otherwise shading windows such that activities inside were obscured from view and serving liquor after hours. Other trifling affairs that piqued the curiosity of the authorities were reports that the bars were used as de facto offices for prostitutes, pimps, hustlers, drunks, gamblers, burglars, crooked cops, and other unsavory characters thought to be contributing to a general decline in the Haymarket’s public appeal. On a ‘vice tour’ of the area, the mayor once took it upon himself to scold the owner of the Jefferson Tavern personally. According to lore, on his way out the door, Farnsley pointed and said, “Behave yourself.” The owner, arms folded, is reported to have responded simply by saying, “Ha.”
Completing the cycle of flirtation with mass transit, the construction of I-65 and its adjacent ramps through the heart of the district cinched its demise and, on September 1, 1962, it was officially closed. Plans made by the Urban Renewal Board to re-open the market began soon after and, in 1966, Produce Plaza was opened between East Jefferson and East Market featuring stalls and shops presided over by many of the same vendors who sold their wares for years in the original Haymarket. The official name of the area may have changed, but it continued to be called the Haymarket by all. Some readers will, no doubt, retain fond memories of wintertime at the Produce Plaza era Haymarket where, as the fruit and vegetable season concluded, the lot filled up with freshly cut Christmas trees.
In 1988, a new, fully enclosed, facility was constructed which sought to modernize the Haymarket experience and draw customers back into a downtown landscape deeply in need of renewed interest and vitality. While the market operated for years selling produce in what was otherwise an urban food desert, the Haymarket District had dimmed to a mere shimmer of its former kaleidoscopic tumult. The last light of Louisville’s Public Market Place was a pink neon sign hanging in a window on East Jefferson Street, yards away from the former Louisville and Frankfort Railroad train platform, which said, in cursive script, “Haymarket.” In 2003, the building was demolished, leaving an empty lot.
The block was purchased by the Louisville Medical Center Development Corp. in 2003 and construction is nearing completion on the Nucleus Innovation Center – Market Street, a research park and laboratory facility underwritten by the University of Louisville, Louisville Metro, and Nucleus: Kentucky’s Life Sciences and Innovation Center LLC. The building will contain state of the art medical research facilities, will be constructed under strict environmental conservation guidelines pursuant to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification standards, and will feature a green roof to be maintained by the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.
Before construction began on the Nucleus Innovation Center – Market Street, the Kentucky Archaeological Survey conducted an excavation on the site of the old Haymarket to learn more about the countless Louisvillians who had lived, worked, and shopped there. The archaeologists retrieved only shards of pottery from the 19th century – fragments of the River City’s history that had traveled an incredible distance without moving at all.
-Joe Manning
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