The Baltimore Sun, October 26, 2005
“Super Markets”
In an era of retail giants and gourmet groceries, Baltimore's markets still are the place to meet and eat.

Bill Blueford may be the oldest fixture in Cross Street Market.When it reopened two weeks ago after a $1.3 million renovation, the market in Federal Hill looked like a spit-polished shoe. There were new floors, a new brick facade, decorative shutters and improved lighting.

Amid the glow of this promising urban renewal was Blueford, 89, sitting in Big Jim's Deli, enjoying a cup of coffee. Watching old friends and new urbanites filter through the market over the lip of his Styrofoam cup, Blueford symbolizes the story of Baltimore's markets, a story of tradition meeting technology and history competing with convenience.

Blueford comes to the market most mornings from his condominium at Harbor Court to meet people and socialize with the stall holders. The South Baltimore native has been coming to the market almost every day for the last 50 years.

"It's part of me, you might say, because I've lived here my whole life," he says. "Of course, today things have changed. The ladies used to come down on Saturday to do their shopping. Now I guess their children take them to the outlying areas to the supermarkets that didn't exist back then."

In an era when big-box chains are gobbling up small businesses like so many minnows, Baltimore's markets are one of the last bastions of family enterprise. Some market tenants have been in business for generations. At Lexington Market, there's Faidley's Seafood, founded in 1886 and still serving phenomenal crab cakes, and Mary Mervis Delicatessen, which has been providing hefty corned-beef sandwiches since 1913. Nunnally Brothers Choice Meats, one of the 23 vendors at Cross Street Market, has been in business for 130 years.

Tommy Chagouris grew up in the market system. His father, Nick, began Nick's Inner Harbor Seafood in Cross Street Market in 1971, yet the family's history with hucksters stretches further back.

Chagouris has grown Nick's into a mini empire, but there's still a picture hanging behind the counter of the family's first fish stall at Lexington Market, taken in the 1930s when Chagouris' grandparents arrived here from Greece. "To say I love the market is putting it mildly," says Chagouris. "When it gets in your blood, you can't shake it."

Baltimore's markets survive, or most of them have, and remain what they were at the beginning - a hub of community life. Whether they can survive in the new century may depend on what they've learned from their history, one interlaced with the stories of immigrant communities.

Baltimore boasts the oldest continually operating public market system in the United States. The city built its first market at Gay and Baltimore streets in 1763, with funds collected from a public lottery. By 1773 the markets were a regulated business.

The first markets were built near Baltimore's population centers and commerce activities. Broadway Market in Fells Point was established in 1784 to support the bustling waterfront community. Lexington Market was established on the west side in 1783 as a simple farmers' market. At its apex, the city market system featured 11 markets, each serving a segment of the city and catering to that population.

"They were the forerunners of supermarkets where people bought produce, meat, fish, you name it," says Erik Gordon, a professor of marketing at the Johns Hopkins University's Graduate Division of Business and Management. "Like a supermarket, it was a convenience for urban buyers in the same way a shopping center is for suburban buyers. It's a place where you can go to one place, walk around generally inside or at least under something covered, and pick up most of what you need, at least in the early days, for a couple of days' worth of eating at home."

The markets were always a microcosm of the neighborhoods they served, says Casper Genco, executive director of Lexington Market Inc. and the Baltimore Public Markets Corp., which oversees the city's markets. "The public market system has always been an immigrant market system with small entrepreneurs coming in and opening businesses in a public market forum," he says.

Genco says that when Lexington Market opened, its businesses catered to mostly European immigrants arriving from countries such as Germany, Poland and Italy. Although many of those businesses are still in the market today, often run by descendants of the original stall holder, they share space with a new wave of immigrants.

"The markets are constantly going through an evolutionary process where they change and adapt to serve the neighborhood," says Genco. "Now, if you look at some of the markets, they have a significant number of Asians in them. It's always been a system whereby small businesses and entrepreneurs have come and developed their trade and successfully maintained a business while raising a family."

Over the past century the markets have been beset by fire, urban flight and the development of a mobile, automotive society. In 1955, an authority charged with reviewing the market system was quoted in The Sun decrying the market era and stating that, "The time has come when the old markets must stand up against the big supermarkets and shopping centers that dot the outer perimeter of the city. ... The old markets need brightening up; they should advertise and greatly expand the variety of things for sale."

Despite the gloomy assessment, the markets survived because their offerings were unique and their prices low. But that is changing, too. This is a world gone wild over Wegmans, a time when supermarkets carry the artisanal cheeses and breads once available only in market stalls. Yet the city continues to put money into renovations at the markets, signifying its belief that they will continue to be viable.

"If I were managing one of those [markets], here's what I would do," says Johns Hopkins' Gordon. "I would make sure my tenant mix has two features to it. One, reflect the particular ethnic mix of my neighborhood in a very micro way that maybe a big supermarket that's part of a chain couldn't do. ... And I would make sure there are enough stalls that are quirky, off-the-wall, fun, nutty things you'd never, ever see in a Safeway or a Giant Food. You need some of that urban, quirky fun, even if it's just to show you are different."

Although Gordon doubts that more markets will be built anytime soon, he believes those that remain have a future. "I think cities that have traditionally had them, like Baltimore, will continue to have at least a couple of them. I think there is a sustainable size if they are well-managed and if, in the case of some of them, they can get the perception of safety right," he says.

"They need to continue to tenant with interesting tenants that really focus not just on a wide variety of cheeses, but specialize on the really peculiar cheese that, say, Ukrainian or Polish people want. Safeway might have two cheeses that Ukrainian people want. If you put in a cheese stall with 15, that's how you survive. It's a niche game."

Back at Big Jim's Deli where Bill Blueford buys his morning coffee, Anna Epsilantis looks every bit the part of Cross Street Market's future. Like so many of Federal Hill's new urban dwellers, she is youthful and vivacious. Her grandfather worked in the market and she is "Big Jim's" daughter.

"I feel like we're dinosaurs," says the self-proclaimed market rat with a smile. "You can't compete with something that size [a supermarket]."

Yet she thinks the markets will stay alive if they keep pace with the city's renewal. "The joy of the market is that all walks of life come through here," she says. "I'm probably the only person who knows street people by name. But then we also get judges," she says.

Besides being a place to shop, the market is a meeting place, she adds. "You can come here and still know your butcher by name. It's more personal, and it's fun."