Boston Beyond the Souvenir Stands

I’ve always had a certain fondness for Boston. It was the first truly large city I visited, the first place that was effortlessly cosmopolitan, the first place that buzzed in an important-seeming way that was absent in the isolated and suburban city where I grew up. I was properly obsessed with it. I visited about once a year in the late 1990s, but even when I wasn’t there, I studied maps, poured over photos, read the Boston Globe and online discussion forums. Eventually, those regular visits stopped, and my fascination with Boston began to wane.

Last November, I sped down Vermont highways in a rented Toyota Matrix, on an impulsive road trip that brought me back to Boston for the first time in eight years. I was curious to see how the Boston of my memory stacked up to the Boston I would experience that late-autumn weekend. On a particularly chilly Friday evening, I wandered from Allston to Downtown Crossing and back again. Everything seemed vaguely familiar but strangely foreign. Maybe it was six years of living in Montreal, or maybe it was the rapid gentrification and upscaling that had occurred since 1999, but Boston seemed to have lost a certain big-city edge. It felt tame, relaxed, maybe even a little provincial.

My biggest problem was that nearly every inch of grime, disorder and unpredictability had been scrubbed out of large parts of the central city. There was some left around Chinatown, the edges of the South End, in Central Square, around Allston, but much of Boston seemed to have become similar to the park that replaced the old Central Artery: pretty but kind of a void.

It was a relief, then, to come across the Haymarket, which was as messy and lively as I remembered it. Here, just beyond the souvenir stands of Faneuil Hall and the Quincy Market, is a real street market — a wet market, as you’d call it in Hong Kong — selling fruit, vegetables and meat. It draws an eclectic and varied group of shoppers that stand in contrast to the more homogeneous tourist crowd nearby. It was here, more than anywhere else I visited on my brief return to Boston, that I got a feel of the city I remembered so fondly.

More Haymarket photos here.

Market Lights

Whether it’s Sham Shui Po, Jordan, Sai Ying Pun or Kowloon City, most of Hong Kong’s older neighbourhoods have a similar aesthetic, with the same stained concrete buildings, steel doors, sidewalk altars and worn awnings. It gives the city a remarkably cohesive character despite having such a large population and such varied geography.

The same is true for Hong Kong’s many markets: whether in the street or in a market hall, fish, meat and produce is almost invariably sold under the glow of distinctive red lamps. Like a visual catchphrase, they are an instant and unconscious sign to passersby that fresh food is available.

I’ve seen these red lamps in Macau, too, and as far as I can tell they’re also used in Guangzhou and other Cantonese cities. But I’ll bet that only in Hong Kong have they been used ironically: in the past few days, walking through the trendy streets of Central, I’ve noticed the lamps in a café, an art gallery and in the window display of a high-end shoe store on Wellington Street.

Paharganj, or the Dregs of Delhi

Tooti Chowk, Paharganj, Delhi

Paharganj is a mix of crowded makeshift homes, budget traveler hangouts, and the odd chunk of decaying heritage. It’s also an example of what happens when a section of town is left to its own devices with little consideration for urban planning.

A few centuries back, Paharganj was a grain bazaar populated almost exclusively by Muslims, a short walk outside the walls of Mughal Delhi. Today, most of the Muslims have gone, but here and there are the domes of an old mosque, fronted by an ugly concrete structure, squatted by several families, or converted to a budget hotel. Most hotels in the neighbourhood are unauthorized windowless dives who steal water and electricity from lesser mortals. Wires and plugs dangle all over, and the shoddy structures look as if they’re about to collapse onto themselves.

The noisy main bazaar is congested with kerosene-powered motorcycles spouting black fumes, three-wheelers, cycle rickshaws, cows, carts, and the occasional car squeezing through. I even saw an elephant rambling through at 11PM, its driver asleep for the night on his back. Wide-eyed shellshocked travelers, fresh off the plane, can’t see beyond the noise, cows, and raw sewage. Then there’s the old India veterans, dreadlocks down their back, also shellshocked, but in a different way — they took a wrong turn on their long strange trip and ended up in Delhi. Both of these groups feel like they’re in transit — Paharganj is an unfortunate stop on their journey to somewhere a little more scenic or relaxing.

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A Street Market? No, a Railway Market

Mark Slutsky sent me a link to this video today, showing a market lining a railway in Thailand. Within seconds of a train passing through, the market springs back to life.

Naturally, the video raises some pretty obvious questions, like why on earth would a market be located on a set of train tracks? Andrew Leonard, on Salon’s How the World Works, points the way to some explanations. Apparently, the train tracks in question are actually part of the the Mae Klong Railway, an interurban line that runs diesel trams from from Bangkok in the east to Samut Songkhram in the west. Along the way, it passes down some local roads, including a neighbourhood market. The trains are infrequent enough that they don’t pose much of a danger or inconvenience to shoppers or vendors.

According to Justin Bur, who wrote in to Salon, this is not so different from streets markets in Belgium or France through which trams pass. In Hong Kong, trams pass right through the middle of a street market in North Point.

Photos by Richard Barrow

A Night Market in a Suburban Parking Lot

You can’t find an urban tradition more firmly rooted in Asia’s cities than the night market. Since emerging in Tang dynasty China, about 1,200 years ago, they have become a quintessential part of the urban experience in Taiwan, Hong Kong and throughout Southeast Asia. In Taiwan, night markets are so firmly rooted they have spawned an entire cuisine of street foods known as xiao chi, or “small eats.”

Now, just as Chinese immigrants brought the night market tradition to other parts of Asia, they have taken it across the Pacific. The largest night market in North American can be found in Richmond, a flat, sprawling suburb of Vancouver about a twenty minute drive south of downtown. Since it first emerged in a shopping mall parking lot in 2000, the Richmond Night Market has grown into a 400-stall behemoth that draws up to 35,000 people per night. It is held every weekend between May and October, from 7pm to midnight. Although most of the people who visit the night market are Asian, including many Chinese — all of the announcements over the PA system are in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and signs on nearly all stalls are in English and Chinese — it still manages to attract a fairly diverse crowd of Vancouverites, especially as it has gained attention in the English-language media.

Unlike its Asian counterparts, the Richmond Night Market does not take place in the confines of a street. Instead, it’s held in a vast open space, sandwiched between the Fraser River and an industrial park, accessible only by car. But the stalls are arranged in rows, creating the illusion of a crowded lane. Despite its distinctly suburban setting, it offers a kind of outdoor space of interaction that is normally foreign to the suburbs. This is especially true in the most crowded part of the market, around the food vendors. Amidst the odd scent of curried fish balls and miniature donuts, thousands of hungry people munch red bean pancakes, barbecued squid, noodle soup and tong shui.

Despite its popularity, though, the night market’s future is threatened. Earlier this year, its landlord decided not to renew its lease, perhaps seeing development opportunity in its waterfront location. Even with strong support from City Hall, the Richmond tourism bureau and the local chamber of commerce, the market has been unable to find a home for its upcoming 2008 season. It would need at least 15 acres to operate, but finding such a large chunk of open space in Richmond is a huge challenge.

Recognizing the market’s potential both as a tourist attraction and an incubator for small businesses, one Richmond city councillor proposed creating a permanent market space underneath the guideway of the Canada Line, an elevated railway that will link Richmond to Vancouver in 2009. “When I was in Beijing, I saw markets under the roadways and overpasses. They utilize any available space,” he told the Richmond News.

While the councillor’s proposal would do nothing to solve the night market’s immediate need for space, it is a brilliant long-term solution. Not only would it reduce the need for parking, it would create a hub of activity around the Canada Line, which is already attracting new high-density development. Wouldn’t it be fitting if the Richmond Night Market, so suburban until now, ultimately ended up resembling its more urban counterparts across the Pacific?

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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.

Vancouver Orange

Fruit markets on Commercial Drive and East Georgia Street

Scenes from the Spitalfields Market

The Spitalfields Market, just east of the City of London on Commercial Street, has existed in one form or another since 1638. The existing market hall was built in 1887 but a new extension, airily contemporary in contrast to the brick-and-iron heaviness of the old hall, recently opened. Apparently, the annex replaces part of an outdoor trading area, the rest of which has been given over to a complex of Norman Foster-designed office buildings. It also reduced the market’s overall number of trading stalls in favour of new permanent retail spaces that appear to have been leased largely to chain eateries.

Already, the Spitalfields Market serves a diminished role—its wholesale fruit and vegetable business moved to a new East London market in 1991—and the twin forces of gentrification and development pressure could conceivably turn it into something akin to Boston’s Quincy Market, which is to say a pale imitation of an actual public market. Still, the Spitalfields Market remains just that. For the time being, at least, it is a hive of daily activity as nearby residents shop for groceries, office workers line up for cheap lunches and tourists and gawkers like me stand back, watching it all.

The Strawberries Come from California

Most years, in late March, it is strawberry season in California. You might think this would have no bearing on life in Montreal, a nearly 5,000-kilometre drive from the Central Valley, but it does. These California strawberries, as cartoonishly big and underwhelming in flavour as they might be, are the first taste of cheap spring fruit we get. 99 cents for a big box—just ignore how much fuel was used to ship them here and you can almost pretend it’s summer.