FARMERS MARKETS NURTURE A NEED FOR OPEN SPACE

Carol Lloyd

Sunday, January 14, 2007

In the mythology of the American Dream, it's the privacy of our sanctuaries that defines, comforts and nourishes us. Homes, we are told again and again, embody our innermost desires. But lately I've been feeling how other sorts of spaces -- public, free and accessible to all - are emerging to show us what home really means. Perhaps home isn't where we feather our nest with fancy things but the place that feeds the soul of a community.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the growth of farmers' markets in California. In 1974, when the federal government passed the Farmer to Consumer Direct Marketing Act to allow farmers to sell their products beyond their roadside stands, there were fewer than 100 farmers' markets in the nation. According to "Fresh From the Farmers' Market" by The Chronicle's Janet Fletcher, in 1977, California had four farmers' markets. Today, experts estimate there are nearly 500 (numbers vary depending on the definition of farmers' market), with close to 100 in the Bay Area.

What does this all have to do with real estate? Even as our farmland has been devoured by suburban sprawl, Californians have voted with their shopping bags to make farmers' markets an increasingly ubiquitous element in big cities, small towns and, yes, even those suburbs that pave fields of vegetables.

Beyond the showcase pavilion of San Francisco's Ferry Building -- an orgy of organic gourmet comestibles for the deep-pocketed foodie -- more modest farmers' markets have sprung up in the darnedest places, including the empty lot behind Target in Serramonte Plaza in Daly City and on the banks of the Russian River in the hamlet of Duncans Mills.

What exactly has happened to create the farmers' market boom? In some ways it's all inextricably linked to the urban real estate boom. The young professionals who bought into the revitalized inner city are often the same people who bought into Alice Waters' "buy local and organic" revolution. Even as they embraced urban living, they still wanted a connection to the earth.

But there are other forces: Waves of Asian immigrants have arrived with the memory of farmers' markets still alive in their family traditions. Agribusiness has also led smaller farmers to seek ways to boost profits and network with others like them, and farmers' markets offer them a place to do both.

But I would guess there's something else at work: a growing hunger to occupy public spaces that are egalitarian and unfettered by enclosure, a place that provides an antidote to the private worlds we usually occupy -- the condominium, the corporate workplace, highly controlled retail

environments.

As a young adult, I sought out the farmers' market experience mostly through faraway travel. Forget the museums, temples and palaces, I soon learned that pleasure and education came in the labyrinths of Fez or the fertile night markets of Hohhot, where farmers and micro-restaurateurs sold their wares.

When nature and culture intermingle in something so simple as buying a piece of fruit, it feels like a timeless ritual. (Archaeological records show that there were farmers' markets in Mesopotamia.) Yet unlike many religious traditions where the rituals shift in meaning over time

(sometimes becoming obsolete), the simple fact of buying fresh fruit doesn't change.

Now I go to my neighborhood market, Alemany Farmers' Market -- the oldest continuous farmers' market in California and a place that embodies many of the contradictions of the phenomena.

Started in 1943 by John Brucato, the market's original location was ideal -- at Duboce and Market streets in the heart of the city. In 1947, the city took over the market and relocated it to Alemany Boulevard at the base of the southeastern side of Bernal Hill near Highway 101.

With the erection of Interstate 280 nearby, this wedge of urban oblivion became even more unpicturesque. The market's design bears all the telltale signs of a culture in thrall to automobile worship. It consists of two long rows of stalls separated by a thoroughfare with diagonal parking on each side and parking surrounding it. Sidewalks are narrow, and walking paths through the gantlet of cars are scarce to nonexistent.

On Saturday mornings, it's a gridlock of manic drivers pouring single file into a parking lot of around 500 parking spaces; the sidewalks in front of the stalls are often so crowded that people spill into oncoming traffic. Yet despite its uninspired design and sometimes dangerous layout, the market is massively popular, a rainbow assortment of San Franciscans -- including the dads with double strollers, the octogenarian Chinese ladies with carts stuffed with greens, the large families and the twentysomething couples -- who come to buy from the 60 to 110 vendors selling everything thing from Asian medicinal herbs, homemade gravlax and bags of oranges (10 pounds for $3) to homemade bread, fresh tamales and pomelos the size of basketballs.

In my mostly secular existence, the weekly visit to the farmers' market has become a quasi-spiritual act for me and something like a moral education for my kids. It's a place where I get to show my daughters people practicing their ethics in various ways, whether it's through growing waterless tomatoes or looking after an acquaintance's child while she buys some eggs. These are not grand gestures but ones that need no scriptural explanation.

So in November, when I met Lucas Griffith, a graduate student in landscape architecture at UC Berkeley, as he was conducting a survey to find out why people go to the farmers' market, I was intrigued. As part of his master's thesis on Alemany Farmers' Market, he was asking farmers and patrons to play a game to redesign the market to better suit the community's needs.

"What got me thinking is that farmers' markets increased tenfold between the late '70s and the late '90s, but there aren't more small farmers. If anything, there are less," he explained. He told me he had been coming to the market since he was a child, but as a landscape architect he saw the potential for improvement. He also said he'd had three friends hit by cars that were parking along the central corridor.

Through his interviews he learned a lot about how the farmers' market functions in the lives of the patrons. "Most people came for cheap food, fresh food and a sense of community," he told me last week. "A lot of people called it family time. The average number of years people had been coming here was 15."

What's interesting is that with the exception of a few showcase spots like the Ferry Building and Davis' centrally located parkside market, most farmers' markets are woefully haphazard. Never designed to be farmers' markets, they have sprung up like weeds between cracks in the pavement. Many take place in the no-man's-land of parking lots. They thrive despite urban and suburban landscapes that are designed without them in mind.

Griffith's project also gave me a glimpse of how far we are from being able to imagine the potential of such spaces. Some market-goers pictured whimsical solutions to the problem of faraway parking such as having a band of bicycle rickshaws helping people to their car or up the steep hills home. But others were resistant to any kind of change -- fearing that change would mean wholesale gentrification.

The voices against change have even squelched concerns about safety. Because of the several occurrences of pedestrians getting hit by cars along the market's congested central thoroughfare, the city has tried to close it to car traffic. But the farmers, sure that close parking is necessary for some patrons, revolted and closed the market. Ultimately, the city relented.

Although many people wanted the central thoroughfare to be turned into a pedestrian promenade, Griffith said, many expressed resistance to any change that might take away parking. Griffith met one elderly woman who had been coming to the farmers' market for years, parking along the central street and doing business with farmers from her car.

"I learned, 'if it's not broke, don't fix it,' " Griffith said, adding that he thinks the market could be improved but that resistance to change suggests a larger issue." It becomes about how do you effect change in a community which doesn't displace people."

In a sense, the market had become an old-fashioned small town -- with a characteristic resistance to changes that might upset the status quo. Griffith's experiment in collaborative design shows how urban design just doesn't matter as much as the function and the spirit of the people in it. But it also points to an unfortunate fact about our car dependency.

Once a space has been designed to accommodate cars, it often takes a catastrophe (such as the Loma Prieta earthquake, which ultimately meant the end to the Embarcadero Freeway in front of the Ferry Building) to open our minds to the designs that might actually fulfill the dream of their function.

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