By Daniel Nelson
Spring 2008 Kaplan Award Winner
I’m intrigued by the short woman a few yards away. Over weathered dark blue slacks and coat, she wears a camo hat and small green backpack that seem to me vaguely elvish. I would guess that she’s within a decade of her late fifties and probably an immigrant from somewhere in Southeast Asia. She provokes both my deep empathy and a hint of jealousy.
Balancing precariously on a recycled crate, she leans her already-hunched frame and reaches into the dumpster with a crusty pair of oversized metal salad tongs. After a few moments of rummaging, a pristine stalk of celery is extracted. Stepping down, she nestles it into a cardboard box amongst a colorful array of other fruits and vegetables. This is her cardboard box and I get the impression that she’s filled it many dozens of times. I’m overwhelmed by a piercing sense of dignity in her actions that make me feel at the same time uncomfortable and honored to observe her ritual.
As she enters the busy market, curiosity overpowers self-consciousness. I do my best to pretend that I’m interested in something else and follow her frail duck-footed steps past the stalls. Like a metronome, she checks through a list of likely places for fallen fruit and vegetables hiding on the brick floor. To the better-dressed shoppers towering several feet above her, she is invisible amidst a rushing torrent. To the shop owners, however, she seems respected, acknowledged, and perhaps even loved. As she looks under a vibrant display of freshly-caught live clams, Alaska crabs, and King Salmon—“shipped 48 hrs to anywhere in the world”—the store manager reaches behind a pile of ice and produces a modestly-sized bag of jumbo scallops. I can only assume they were set aside in advance for her. She seems neither shocked nor elated, but graciously accepts the scallops and moves on her way.
This is Seattle’s Pike Place Public Market. I always used to think of the historic market as something of a novelty attraction or tourist event—like the Pacific Science Center or the Seattle Aquarium. Since living in Seattle, however, I’ve felt that this surprisingly-lively market means more. Being stripped of my own favorite beaches, mossy valleys, and old growth forests, I’ve grown curious about places in the city hold meaning for those who live here—or even if they have such places. Where do their dreams live? What histories do they bring with them? Perhaps because of it’s popularity, or perhaps in spite of it, I sensed that Pike’s Place Market is nestled deep in the heart of this confusing city.
It was on this hunch that I set out to learn more, to plunge myself into the market’s history, to explore the market as it exists today, to acquaint myself with its characters, and perhaps to unravel some of the stories woven within it. Reading the historic newspaper descriptions and browsing the market website was downright eerie. Down to minute details—no matter whether the article was from1975 or 2005—the same street performers, vendors, sights, colors and smells were documented almost identically, even many of the same vendors. Reading the “Daystall Rules and Regulations” published by the PDA (Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority) gave me some sense of how this preservation might be accomplished. Vendors are regulated down to inches of their display heights and precise percentages of ingredient types in their bath and body products. Street performers are waitlisted and go through an approval process many months in advance of their required commitments and hours of performance. The current quota of craftspeople is overloaded and no new applicants are currently being accepted. Throughout the document, high prioritization is given to seniority, making it nearly impossible for new vendors to secure even a less-desirable stall in the market. So was the market the same? Absolutely—down to the inches of the display heights. But is it real, authentic, and living? I would be inclined to say “no” except for the people who I knew pour their lives into making the market what it is.
On one of my first visits, I had the cynical sense that I was entering some sort of carnival. At the corner of Pike and 1st,, I watched well-dressed mall-going sorts leaving the market with bundles of fresh flowers, pastries, and occasionally a souvenir t-shirt or overpriced artwork. I half expected them to be in port from a cruise ship, but I saw no fitting boat in harbor. Maybe they were out-of-towners at least? Those around me entering the market waited at the four-way crosswalk with the same anticipation you’d expect of kids in line at Splash Mountain. A sweet greasy smell in the air reminded me of a county fair.
As I entered the upper floor of the market, known as the “Main Arcade” the constant murmur of activity enveloped me. The smells of vegetables, fish, fruits and flowers saturated my senses. Footsteps crisscrossed in all directions around me. While a street artist played guitar and harmonica to a slightly discordant Spanish melody, a slightly inebriated man carried his newspaper-wrapped beer and joked loudly with whoever would listen. Neither succeeded especially well at rising above the droning conversation and banter around them. Next to me, a thirty-something woman was framing a photo of her friend next to Rachel, the giant bronze piggy bank. “You have to climb on,” she coaxed, “or it’s no good.” I silently wondered to myself if Rachel ever felt violated from being sat on and photographed all day long for years on end. To my right, a slightly overweight mother with sharply cut blond hair recklessly surveyed her environment through a Panasonic video camera. It seemed that every other person had a huge camera out, making me feel self-conscious with mine. “I’m not a tourist, I’m a journalist,” I told myself reassuringly. But I put my camera in my bag anyway, just to make sure. Written notes would do.
Outside, an impatient Mercedes horn honked at a stream of pedestrians holding it hostage. It was answered by a confident, but slightly diluted New York accent, “Yo! This is a market, be patient. If you want a freeway go over there!” A disheveled man on the side walk pointed away and held his gaze at the car’s tinted window. Whether or not he was homeless, he could easily pass as such. I smiled a happy smile of vindication and wondered what kind of place this was that gave him authority to reprimand the Mercedes driver.
As I entered, I to try to solve the riddle of the fish throwers’ routine. “Haayy!” a gruff man wearing orange rubber coveralls shouted from the ground. “Haaay—ya!” answered the three vendors from the booth. “Albacore fillet!” the man called. “Albacore fillet!” the voices answered. Next a huge mass of tuna soared past me and was nimbly snatched in a waiting newspaper. “Twenty three!” “Twenty three!” the voices echoed as it was weighed. I couldn’t help but admire their energy and the marketing brilliance of the Pike Place Fish Company. As passersby stopped and surveyed their fish on display, fishermen would engage them in conversation and coax them toward a purchase. “What can I get you for you today, young lady” the gruff man asked an uptight-looking woman of about fifty-five. “We’re just looking,” a suited man next to her quickly answered with a cold tone in his voice. The vendor persisted, “Well you’re doing a hell of a good job!” I smiled again.
Several booths down, I noticed a vintage sign that could have been painted as early as the market’s first opening in 1907. It proclaimed in red capital letters with yellow outlines: “ARCADE NO. 2, QUALITY FRUITS & VEGETABLES, FRESH PICKED DAILY.” Beneath the sign, rows of colored produce stood like a Star Wars army at attention. In addition to the normal fare of apples, oranges and pineapple, the tiered display presented everything from baby bok choy, to ginger, to artichoke, to dark purple eggplant. Further down, beyond another seafood stand, several restaurants, a store selling hand-crafted sausage, and a specialty pasta booth, I noticed a similar produce stand exhibiting fiddlehead fern tips, “sea beans” (a relative of kelp I learned), and apples the size of a small child’s head. I was hungry and still slightly shy about my ambiguous role, so I was happy enough to pay $1.80 for a giant Fuji apple to munch. It didn’t make me fit in as either a worker or a proper customer, but it made me feel more a part of a market and less like I was exploiting it for its stories.
A quick walk through the rest of the main arcade rewarded me with several samples of exotic ginger and jalapeño jellies, fresh pears slices, and a visual feast of locally made art prints and crafts. It was then, with some trepidation, that willed myself to descend into the “Down Under.” The lower level of Pike’s is the kind of place you wander into as a kid looking for a bathroom only to discover yourself lost and trapped between barred windows and closing doors in a dark yellow hallway under nasty flickering lights. Inside the first shop I entered, an ancient fanged eel from the Puget Sound hung preserved above the counter. Being there reminded me of accounts I’d read of Chief Seattle’s daughter and her child haunting the market. The range of products available included kitsch figurines, elaborate knives, ceramic skulls, incense, a fifty-cent glass-encased fortune teller manikin, pin-up posters, and tobacco. It made Sweeties Candy and its giant iconic lollypops across the breezeway feel starkly out of place.
Many days of visits and accumulated hours of breathing the air and just being at the market passed before I felt oriented in any meaningful way. But many questions still bothered me. I thought of quotations attributed to many different names which likened the market to the “soul” of the city. Everyone I spoke with and everything I read pointed with pride at the market’s authenticity and historical sameness. But could dictated “sameness” in the details ever contain a beating heart? Did they construct a living museum instead? Supposing Pike’s was perfectly preserved, did it really epitomize the heart of old Seattle? Could it be, instead, that it painted for us a picture of what we wished Seattle’s heart was and had been? Whatever was true, I wanted to know what it was about the market that people believed in. What has brought them back for ten, twenty, or thirty years?
The vendors themselves are hard to place. They aren’t unkempt, but neither would they fit easily into many crowds. They are just, different. Inside the Main Arcade, a cute woman in dark pigtails plays Zelda melodies on handmade ocarinas. She may not look it, but she has been at the market twenty four years. Each evening, from closing till two in the morning, a janitor named Gar cleans the stalls across from the Main Arcade as he has for the last seventeen years. How did he become a part of the market and why does he keep coming back? Half a block down from the historic first Starbucks, a man with long gray hair sings at a small tinny old piano. He’s been playing music at Pike’s for twenty-one years, and still a surprisingly-rich and symphonic sound emerges as his spring-loaded hands dart across the keys with wild enthusiasm. As sings out rhymes about environmental justice, consumerism, and corporate takeover in government, I wonder about his relationship to the government-run PDA and adjacent Starbucks manager. Inside the fruit stalls, works a young high school drop out, who smells lightly of marijuana and wears a black sweatshirt sewn over with patches. What compels him to wake up at six each morning to open?
As I continue exploring the market, these are the people who I hope will hold the answers not only to why the market is so highly valued, but also what to what threatens it most.