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Before the food hall, Union Market was a 1931 produce market built by wholesalers pushed out of downtown, on a World War I camp turned circus lot.
The lost and untold stories of Washington, DC. The buildings, blocks and people the city and region forgot.
The Beatles played their first American concert here. Sharks turned up in the Potomac in 1911. Ford’s Theatre collapsed in 1893 while government clerks worked inside.
Since 2012, Ghosts of DC has been digging through old newspapers, maps and archives for stories like these, from Georgetown to Anacostia and across the whole DMV. Now they’re a podcast.
Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.
Something for the Metro ride or the walk to work.
Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.
On Sunday, February fifteenth, nineteen thirty-one, the Washington Post ran a full-page ad for a brand-new food market in Northeast. And down at the bottom, there's the address. Patterson Tract. Camp Meigs. Camp Meigs was a World War One army camp. By nineteen thirty-one, it was better known as the city's circus lot. Today that whole neighborhood around Fifth Street and Florida Avenue Northeast is called Union Market. The food hall, the apartment towers, all of it. So how did an army camp and a circus lot turn into Union Market? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.
I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. If you've ever stood in line at the Union Market food hall, this one's about the ground under your feet. And if you want to see exactly where it happened, this story is pinned on our new Atlas, a map of our stories, at Ghosts of D C dot org slash atlas.
The story starts downtown. For decades, Washington's food trade ran through Center Market on Pennsylvania Avenue. Around it, along B Street, were the commission merchants, the wholesalers who sold farmers' produce for a cut. Then the federal government decided it wanted that land. The plans for the Federal Triangle meant Center Market, and every commission house around it, had to go. Congress debated where the city's new market should go for years, and finally picked a site in Southwest in nineteen twenty-nine. A big group of the produce men had already moved on. Back in August of nineteen twenty-eight, the Evening Star reported that merchants doing seventy-five to eighty-five percent of the city's fruit and vegetable business had a plan of their own. A row of stores on a new, extended Fifth Street in Northeast, with space set aside for farmers. On a piece of land called the Patterson tract. Which had already had quite a life.
For most of the eighteen hundreds, this was country. Florida Avenue was still called Boundary Street, the edge of the city, and north of it were fields and woods. On the hill stood a Greek Revival mansion called Brentwood, built in eighteen seventeen. It was the home of the Pearson family. Their only daughter married a man named Patterson, and the land became the Patterson tract. Then came World War One. In nineteen seventeen, the government leased the land for Camp Meigs. Rows of temporary barracks and mess halls, for about eleven hundred carpenters, chauffeurs, machinists and electricians, all headed for France. After the war, the Hechinger company, yes, the forerunner of the hardware chain, took over the site. It knocked down the barracks and what was left of the old mansion, which had burned, and used part of the ground for storage. The rest stayed an open field. And when traveling circuses came to town, that's where they set up their tents. When the market opened in nineteen thirty-one, the Post still described it as the former Camp Meigs circus grounds.
Work on the market got going in the summer of nineteen twenty-nine. By the next fall, there were forty-two fireproof buildings in four blocks along Fifth Street. Two stories of buff brick, each with its own elevator, long canopies out front, and flagpoles on the roof. Not everyone was thrilled. Gallaudet, the college for the deaf right next door, fought the zoning change the market needed. But on Monday, February sixteenth, nineteen thirty-one, the market formally opened. The ad called it the Union Market Terminal, and promised a far cry from the crowded jumble and traffic jams downtown on B Street. And the farmers came too. Two hundred and fifteen of them, from Maryland and Virginia, signed up for three hundred stands, under two long steel sheds across Fifth Street. That summer, though, the old circus grounds had one more show in them.
On August third, nineteen thirty-one, the one oh one Ranch Wild West Show pitched its tents on the market lot. And then it couldn't leave. The company couldn't pay its back wages. The performers went on strike. And the whole outfit just sat there, for about two weeks. A reporter from the Washington Daily News found them waiting on breakfast. Here's how he saw it. Eighteen gangling cowboys, most of them from Wyoming or Oklahoma, sixteen cowgirls and twenty-nine Indians nodded their heads to the sizzling of frying bacon. They weren't worried. They told him, The show's the thing. Listen to the bacon fry. We're still eating, aren't we? So local laborers were hired to take down the tents. And the performers talked them out of it. The Daily News quoted them. If we can't get the money due us for weeks, how do you expect to get paid for this little job? It took a crew of forty men brought down from Baltimore to finally pull the tents. The unpaid company, the Post reported, stood by and watched.
By the late nineteen thirties the market was humming, and in time, most people knew it as the Florida Avenue Market. It even had its own steakhouse, Cannon's, on Fifth Street. A nineteen forty-two ad put it this way. You wend your way around sacks of potatoes and crates of oranges, to a busy, well organized restaurant, clean as a whistle from stem to stern. The city did not see the rest of the market that way. In nineteen fifty-two, a health official told the marketmen the sanitation was a disgrace to the city. If they didn't cooperate, he warned, they would have to tell it to the judge. But the bigger threat was the supermarket. In nineteen sixty-three, an Evening Star columnist rode along at four in the morning with the produce buyer for Giant, the supermarket chain. He wrote that the darkness made candles of the street lights in the market. And at one banana company, he was told a big tarantula had just dropped out of a bunch. The buyer didn't sugarcoat it. These big city markets are dying, he said, and it's the chain stores are doing it.
On a spring day in nineteen sixty-four, the city's health director, Dr. Murray Grant, toured the farmers' sheds across Fifth Street from the wholesale rows, and a Post reporter went along. The reporter found two men looking at the same shed. And seeing completely different things. One was a vegetable seller named Delaware Barbour. He told the reporter the place looked great. A sight for sore eyes. Barbour said he started at eight years old, with a billy goat and a cart. At thirteen, he got a horse. He'd been at this market more than thirty years. He'd quit a couple of years back, but he was coming back. I'm seventy-eight, he said, and I'm going to sell some vegetables. The other was Dr. Grant. He saw poor refrigeration, too few places to wash, dirt and flies. Something has to be done about this, he said. The reporter summed it up. The farmers' market is a long steel shed, open at the sides and ends. Birds nest in the beams. It's a picturesque place, and there's no wonder that Barbour loves it, and no wonder either that Dr. Grant doesn't.
Dr. Grant won in the end. The open-air farmers' market closed over health code violations, and an indoor market building went up in nineteen sixty-eight. But the wholesalers stayed. By the nineteen eighties, many of the newer wholesale firms were owned by Chinese and Korean immigrants. As late as twenty twelve, they were still working out of the old rows. By then, the rows were looking pretty run-down. In twenty twelve, a developer opened a food hall on Fifth Street under the old name, Union Market. And in twenty seventeen, the old rows went on the National Register as a historic district. So the next time you're in line at Union Market, look across Fifth Street at those buff brick rows with the flagpoles on the roof. They were built by the produce men the Federal Triangle pushed out of downtown. On an old army camp that had become the circus lot.
So that's how a circus lot became Union Market. This one comes from eighteen sources, from a nineteen twenty-eight Evening Star story to the market's National Register listing in twenty seventeen. You'll find them all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org. Thanks for listening. If you'd like the next one to show up on its own, hit follow on Ghosts of DC, and a quick rating helps more people find us. We're out here bringing back the lost and untold stories of Washington, one block at a time. This has been Ghosts of DC.