Before Pike Place: Seattle's Push for a Public City Market
An 1904 farm-paper editorial argued that Seattle lagged behind smaller eastern cities by lacking a daily public market where rural producers could sell directly to consumers — a proposal that anticipated Pike Place Market by three years.
Seattle ought to have a "city market" — a place where the people from the rural districts can place their produce on sale daily and where anybody can go and purchase what he wants. Such a market is maintained in many eastern cities that can boast of not half the population Seattle has. A market of this kind would give an outlet for a great deal of produce that is now allowed to go to waste where it was grown. It is not every rancher that cares to send in his produce to the commission houses, but if the large cities in the state would each maintain a city market there would be opened to the producer in each section a channel through which he could dispose of his goods and make a good deal extra money. The expressions of opinion that we have heard as to the utility of such a market in Seattle are all favorable. The producers in the territory tributary to Seattle are invited to express their opinions in the columns of The Ranch.
“Seattle ought to have a "city market" — a place where the people from the rural districts can place their produce on sale daily and where anybody can go and purchase what he wants.”
Seattle's public-market campaign would culminate in Pike Place Market in 1907, and the argument here — direct sales, fresh food, and a city that makes room for farmers — still shapes how Seattle thinks about food access and public space. The same questions about who gets to sell, and where, remain with us.
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