Faire Son Marché (Makin' Groceries)

Faire Son Marché (Makin’ Groceries)

By Sarah Baird

It can sometimes feel impossible to separate iconic buildings and public spaces from the role they play in the identity of a city and the greater public consciousness. When a typical person looks at the Eiffel Tower, they don’t think about how it once housed both a post office on the first floor and a newspaper, Le Figaro, for six months in 1889.

The Sydney Opera House, with its one-enveloping-the-other shell structure, is among the most photographed buildings in the world, but few people remember that the forecourt of the space became a venue for sheep shearing and ski-jumping into the harbor when Australia celebrated its bicentennial in 1988. Easily recognizable spaces live many diverse lives, most of which are forgotten in the shadow of their enduring grandeur.

The same depths of storied — often forgotten — history is true of New Orleans’ French Market, a public space that has bustled and thrived for centuries while reflecting the wants, needs and desires of an ever-changing city. It can be impossible for casual visitors snacking on beignets at Café Du Monde to visualize all the intricate parts that have whirred as part of the French Market’s role as the city’s culinary and agricultural lodestar, not to mention how its position as a living, breathing organism has shifted over time. Long before there were grocery stores, the French Market was the hub for ingredients and wares, and wandering through the market’s (messy, assuredly boisterous) buildings was a liveaction stroll through the bounty of Louisiana’s rich meat, seafood, vegetables and fruits.

Today, it’s easy to see the French Market as the iconic sum of its parts, but by puzzling out the cogs that have made the French Market hum throughout history, we can get a more holistic and enduring picture of what this public space means not just for today, but for yesterday and tomorrow.

INDIGENOUS CULTURE (PRE-FRENCH MARKET)

The history of trading, bartering and selling wares next to the Mississippi River outdates both the French Market and the City of New Orleans itself. As far back as 1675, nearly 100 years before the first “official” iteration of the French Market opened, indigenous groups like the Choctaw, Chitimacha, Ishak, Tunica and Natchez nations traded provisions on the riverbanks, not only among themselves but with exploratory parties from other countries. The native name for the trading post was Bulbancha — meaning “land of many tongues” — in reflection of how many different cultures gathered there to swap necessities.

ARCHITECTURE

The French Market’s architectural design has been a revolving door of construction styles and bottom-up rebuilds over its lifetime, but one feature has always remained: It is a series of buildings — largely open-air — and not a single structure.

“The pile of buildings that composes the French Market consists of several different edifices — the Meat Market, the Bazaar Market, the Fruit Market and the Vegetable and Fish Market. All of these are under different roofs. The medley throng of life that goes on [there] is as picturesque, as unique…as if overhead were the gay tents of Constantinople stalls,” writes journalist Catherine Cole in her 1916 work, The Story of the Old French Market. “What a mingling of people it is!”

While the oldest extant French Market building dates back to 1813 and housed the anchor industry of the operation, the Meat Market, the market’s first “official” build-out dates back even earlier. According to the French Market Corporation’s historical archives, the Spanish erected the city’s first open-air food market building around the year 1782 (through some records indicate an earlier date of 1770 for the first market) on the corner of Chartres and Dumaine streets, which was relocated to a site on what is now Decatur Street between St. Ann and Dumaine in 1790. “A series of hurricanes destroyed several early structures at this location,” the record notes, “but the building erected in 1813 as the Meat Market has survived to the present.”

Until the restoration and cleanup efforts funded (in part) by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, the French Market was characterized largely by its grit and chaos, both structurally (the first iteration of the market was built out of cypress wood) and on an active, day-to-day basis. The Meat Market, seafood stalls, fruit stands, flower sellers, vegetable hall and — eventually — coffee purveyors all clamored loudly with their sales pitches, spilling over into one another’s action as groceries were made, and the richness of South Louisiana put on full display.

MEAT

Before the French Market was given its current moniker, it was known throughout town as Le Halle des Boucheries — or the “Meat Market” — due to the fact that it was the

only place in the French Quarter allowed to sell meat because of the decidedly hands-on and (let’s face it) gory nature of butchering.

“Plunging incontinently into the meat market, a great clatter of coffee-cups, a cheery chumping as of chopping meat, various cries and polyglot invitations to buy, an omnipresent hum and hustle, with other sights, scents and sounds of traffic — all these await us,” proclaims an 1875 edition of The New Orleans Bulletin. “The butchers are naturally lords paramount of the scene. Here are butchers rotund, sturdy and civil, the Anglicism of their features Americanized by three generations’ descent; butchers of the old French type, so elderly, clean shaven and obsequious that you would not be surprised at a pig-tail being whisked into your face during their brisk gesticulations; butchers akin to the modern Parisian, with the closest cropped heads; butchers more or less remarkable, but all busy, and all more or less animated.”

Today, the Meat Market building is home to the constantly photographed, ever-recognizable Café Du Monde.

FISH AND SEAFOOD

The Fish Market inside the French Market rotated locations several times over the course of its lifespan — and was often bundled together with the Bazaar Market — but never lost its undulating spirit of watery aliveness.

“The glistening slabs of gray marble reflect the overhanging pent roofs, and Spanish mosses are twisted about the slender bars of iron on the stands. In baskets of latanier lie blue and scarlet crabs; in others are dark red crawfish looking like miniature lobsters. On beds of moss, like smaller lobsters still, the delicate river shrimps are fighting for life. They may be still powdered with the grits that tempted them into the fisherman’s net,” writes Cole in 1916. “Croakers hang in silver bunches; flat pompanos, their sleek skins shining, lie side by side with bluefish, Spanish mackerel, and trout for tenderloining. If you buy crabs, by the way, the dealer throws over them a handful of Spanish moss in which they tangle their claws and cannot get away.”

In Charles L. Thompson’s 1950 work, Chronological History of The Old French Market: The most historic spot in America’s most interesting city from 1770 to 1937, Thompson discusses in great detail the French Market’s ever-shifting seafood hall. “The first fish market was erected in 1840 and was for sea food only. However, it became overcrowded and when the new market was erected…originally intended for a vegetable market, [it] was given over to the fish dealers, to relieve the congestion…. From that period on the little fish market was transformed into a Bazaar; in fact, it became known as the Bazaar Market, and from that time on it was occupied by numerous dealers in dry goods, notions, etc., as well as a number of novelty dealers…it resembled a mid-way plaisance of a fair or Carnival.”

This swapping and sharing of space between divergent products at the French Market wasn’t unique to seafood, though. In the late 1800s, the Fruit Market often found that poultry purveyors would set up shop in its midst — squawking, feathers flying and all — until the rebuild by the WPA largely sanitized and separated the spaces once and for all.

COFFEE

Thanks, in part, to the French Market’s unique position near shipments coming off of the Mississippi River and, more important, an entrepreneurial free woman of color named Rose Nicaud, the French Market has been synonymous with the development of New Orleans’ coffee culture for over 200 years. After purchasing her freedom, Nicaud sold café au lait from a pushcart around the French Market beginning in the early 1800s, eventually saving up enough money for an uber-popular permanent coffee stand inside the French Market and inspiring countless other African American women along the way.

VEGETABLES AND FRUITS

If the Meat Market was the lionizing head of the French Market, then the stalls of the Vegetable Market (known, at times, as the “hall of vegetables”) were its ever-bustling, whipping tail. This became particularly true by the turn of the 20th century, when Italian immigrants, many of whom operated truck farms, largely ran the show at the Vegetable Market and provided ample, locally grown produce to a public that had become increasingly interested in adding greenery to a collective diet that was, until then, almost exclusively meat- and grain-based.

“On the vegetable stalls…the faded red column that helps to support the roof wears at its capital a gray drapery of cobwebs looped loosely over the graceful iron brackets that spring toward the roof. All the rich wonders of an almost tropic garden are piled about this column,” Cole observes. “Shallots savory enough to tempt one…hang in bouquets; crisp salads, chicory, lentil, leek, lettuce, are placed in dewy bunches next radishes, beets, carrots, butter-beans, alligator pears (a sort of mallow or squash), Brussels sprouts (idealized cabbage); posies of thyme and bay and sage and parsley; a bunch of pumpkins; and overhead, like big silver bells strung on cords, those everlasting garlics braided on their own beards.”

J.P. Rouse even brought local produce — shallots, cabbage, potatoes — from nearby farms to sell at the Vegetable Market in the 1920s, establishing a precedent for a commitment-to-local through public market sales that set the stage for future generations to build a produce shipping company and, eventually, grocery stores.

WARES, SHOWS AND EXTRAS

If you thought that vendors selling items outside of the agricultural framework — hand-poured candles, artisanal soaps, local artists collectives like today’s Dutch Alley Artist’s Co-op — were only modern-day additions to the fabric of the French Market, think again. Almost from the market’s beginning, indigenous craftspeople offered their wares alongside the agricultural mainstays. “In the early American days there were several tribes to be found here including Indians from Bayou Lacombe as well as...from several tribes the remnants of which still existed in Mississippi, some of them came right to the French Market with their herbs and roots as well as basketry and beadwork and disposed of their merchandise,” writes Thompson, who also notes that vaudeville shows and traveling dentists were commonly seen throughout the mid- to late-1800s. “They were to be found in the Bazaar Market and also in the Vegetable Market and are remembered by many of the older merchants and inhabitants, as they were still to be seen up until 1910. The also sold…handmade pottery that did very well.”

Beginning in the mid-1800s, a middle section of the French Market known as the Bazaar Market brought dry goods, fortune tellers, trinkets, flowers and knickknacks of all types from a diversity of sellers, contributing to the multicultural, ever-cacophonous sounds of space.