Pike Place Market United States

Legendary

One of the oldest continuously operated public farmer’s markets in the U.S.

Photo by Matthias Klappenbach

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In November 1971, the people of Seattle voted on whether to tear down their own market and replace it with office towers and a parking garage. The wrecking plans were already approved.

They said no, 73,369 votes to 53,264. It's one of the few times a city has voted to save a building from itself.

The market opened on August 17, 1907, on a rainy Saturday morning. Farmers had been getting cheated by middlemen who bought their produce cheap and sold it to the public high.

A city councilman named Thomas Revelle had an idea: let farmers sell straight to shoppers from wagons parked along Pike Place. Eight farmers showed up that first day and sold out within hours.

The idea worked. Within three months there were 76 stalls, and the motto "Meet the Producer" has stayed on the sign ever since.

By the 1930s, about two-thirds of the market's farmers were Japanese American. In 1942, during World War II, the government forced them into internment camps, and most never came back to farm.

The market limped through the 1950s. By 1963, developers announced plans to knock it down for high-rise apartments and hotels.

An architect named Victor Steinbrueck refused to let that happen. He'd helped design the Space Needle, and he started a group called Friends of the Market that held rallies and printed flyers calling the developers "merchants of greed."

The City Council voted to go ahead with demolition in 1969. Steinbrueck's group got the question onto the ballot instead, and the voters overruled the council.

Today Pike Place is the oldest continuously running public market in the country. More than 500 shops, stalls, and restaurants fill its nine acres above the waterfront.

Watch the fishmongers at Pike Place Fish throw whole salmon to each other over the counter. Find Rachel, the 550-pound bronze pig under the big red sign, and drop a coin in her back to help fund the market's food bank and clinic. Then walk down Post Alley to the Gum Wall, where thousands of visitors have stuck their chewing gum to the bricks.