To Market, To Market
There’s a new market in Montreal. For the next two weeks, and then again next spring, a farmer’s market will open outside Frontenac metro every Saturday between 10am and 4pm. It’s great news for one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, Ste. Marie, one that has only recently stepped away from an economic and social precipice.
Montreal already has four permanent, year-round public markets — Jean-Talon, Atwater, Maisonneuve and Lachine — and more than a dozen smaller, seasonal markets, including a few that operate 24 hours in the summer. Between the 1960s and early 1990s, though, Montreal’s markets were deeply unfashionable. A number of markets were closed in the 1960s and even the Jean-Talon and Atwater markets, the jewels in Montreal’s market crown, stagnated.
Things began to change in the late 1990s as people became more concerned about what they ate. Two seemingly contradictory tends — the growing popularity of both local produce and “exotic” imported food — made markets the destination of choice for a diverse range of Montrealers. It was not only food that drew them, either. The social experience of shopping at a market, where you can interact with merchants and producers who know a lot about what they sell, in a lively and sensual environment, was a refreshing antitode to the sterility of big-box supermarkets.
Since 2000, a lot of money has been invested in Montreal’s markets. A new market hall built in 2004 nearly doubled the Jean-Talon Market in size and a newly-expanded market in Lachine has also been making a go of it. The number of small neighbourhood markets has been expanding considerably.
Markets can have a remarkably positive effect on their surrounding neighbourhoods for a number of reasons. They’re important public spaces, for one, giving people in the neighbourhood a place to gather and interact. They are economic incubators, giving small merchants, producers and entrepreneurs affordable space to start a business, usually with very low overhead. When those businesses expand, they usually find space in the surrounding area, a trend that can be seen around Jean-Talon.
In a marginal neighbourhood like Ste. Marie, they also give people access to healthy and affordable produce. With that considered, it might be a good thing that the new market at Frontenac metro is a seasonal farmer’s market rather than a less flexible permanent market. When the Lachine Market reopened in 2004, it ignored the everyday grocery needs the surrounding neighbourhood in favour of a more boutique-style approach. It was ultimately reconfigured with a more successful focus on basic fruits and vegetables. Allowing the Frontenac market to evolve gradually might prevent that sort of problem.
On a related note, Le Devoir featured last week two articles on Montreal’s public markets. One, reflecting on the 75th anniversary of the Atwater Market, lamented that farmer’s markets have ceased to be a central part of life in Quebec: “It’s impossible now to a take a photo like the ones made at the beginning of the last century, when you could see Place Jacques-Cartier filled with shoppers, carts and the horses of vegetable producers or cars of growns who had come to town.”
Another takes a close look at the Jean-Talon Market and the changes it has seen since it opened. There’s more variety than in decades past… but no more live chickens.
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