Don’t forget what they took from you
The Farmers Market building San Saba St entrance in the 1950s. By 1980 this would be closed and converted into the tourist hellscape known as El Mercado. Supporting small-scale local farms is an important way to reclaim our city’s fascinating and important heritage.
General Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections.
We are so deep into the Big Ag and Supermarket era that it’s difficult to even get a glimpse of the food world we used to inhabit here in South Texas. Meeting folks this spring at markets around town, I’ve come to discover that as a city we almost treat growing food here on any scale as a physical impossibility. It’s too hot, it’s too dry, why bother? The reality of course is that Bexar County has a great climate for growing an immense variety of produce (almost) year round. This gave birth to a food market culture in San Antonio that was as vibrant as any in the country and was an important local institution for almost 200 years. In the space of less than two decades it was killed off by a combination of Federal policy, macroeconomic factors and good old fashioned municipal incompetence. How did we go from that abundance to barely being able to support one or two mediocre farmers markets in a metro area of 2.5 million residents?
Agricultural history goes back further in San Antonio than anywhere else in the United States west of the Mississippi, (barring the upper reaches of the Rio Grande in New Mexico and lower reaches of the Gila River in Arizona where native people have of course farmed for millennia). The area’s suitability for agriculture is what made it the principal city of the region. The combination of permanent springs, rich black clay soil and a long growing season led San Antonio to become many times larger and wealthier than less well endowed areas of Spanish settlement in East and South Texas. In the pre-industrial era, good farmland was the next best thing to a gold mine for economic development. As Jesus F. de la Teja writes in his essay on “Colonial Views of Land and Nature”, featured in Char Miller’s “On the Border: An Environmental History of San Antonio”, “San Antonio was well suited not only to crop agriculture but to horticulture as well. At the settlement’s founding in 1718, Martin de Alarcon provided for “grapevines and fig trees and diverse fruit seeds, melon and watermelon as well as squash and peppers.”. Vegetable gardens and orchards soon sprouted, both in the neighborhood of the presidio and at the missions, benefiting from the acequias, which were also made to run through the center of each population center. By the 1740s the presence of fruit trees on a lot was worthy of mention in land sales at San Antonio and added to the value of property… Fray Solis claimed that the peaches of Mission San Jose “which are grown in large quantities, weigh about a pound each”. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to take that lat bit about the peaches literally, but I think it’s safe to assume they were some really good peaches!
Bird's-eye view of Haymarket Plaza from roof of Municipal Market House, San Antonio, Tex. (1925). Everyone living in the moment, not a 401k in sight.
General Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections.
Agriculture only intensified with the new wave of Anglo settlements beginning in the 1830s. With that population growth came the need for more space to sell local produce. Various locations have been used over the years and the geography is somewhat confusing, so I have prepared a simple map on Google Maps to help explain. As the population grew, a new market building was established east of Main Plaza in the 1870s to supplement the outdoor produce vending that had always gone on in Main Plaza and the Plaza de Armas. But so explosive was the region’s population growth in the second half of the 19th century that it was deemed necessary to move this business out of the congested, colonial core and towards the more spacious west side of the city center. Beginning in the 1890s, public land known as Washington Square (on Dolorosa St, today home a cheap hotel, more on that later) began to be used as a simple space for producers to pull up wagons (and later trucks) to sell to directly out of their vehicles to the public.
In 1900, in an effort to modernize the market district, a brand new market house was built on what was then known as Paschal Square, across from today’s Milam Park. The new building only occupied a corner of the square, the rest of the square was given over to outdoor produce vending just as it had been at Washington Square. This area in front of the market house became known as the Haymarket. It remained a chaotic outdoor free for all (essentially a giant parking lot for produce trucks) from the 1890s until 1938, when the Works Progress Administration built a new covered market on the site (pictured above). As Paula Allen describes in her 2013 column in the Express-News, “All vendors in the city-owned facilities were independent truck farmers and gardeners and rented their stall space by the month. Produce and flowers were locally grown, and customers could be hotel and restaurant workers, other merchants or housewives. The area also was home to restaurants, pharmacies and other businesses that served the market employees and shoppers.” This building remains preserved as the faux-Mexico tourist trap known as El Mercado. Today the old Haymarket is essentially completely forgotten, but it was the heart and soul of the city’s vibrant produce and market culture for the better part of a century before its demise in the 1950s.
Leona DeBacker Persyn unloading produce at the [new] Terminal Market, 1953.
General Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections.
The first nail in the coffin for the produce markets was the establishment of the Produce Terminal in 1951 at the corner of S Laredo St and S Zarzamora St further out on the West Side. This new location was much more spacious, featured indoor warehouse space and accommodated large refrigerated delivery trucks, which for the first time began to arrive from outside Texas. As Paula Allen describes, “As soon as the new market opened, 40 Farmers Market stallholders moved out; the city couldn't immediately rent the deserted stalls because rents for them had been paid on a six-month schedule. It's doubtful that they would have been replaced anyway. While many Farmers Market businesses initially declared their intention to keep “doing business at the same ole stand” in a Sept. 14, 1952, advertisement in the San Antonio Express, the big business of produce gradually moved out of downtown.”
The second nail was urban renewal. The West Side of downtown was subject to an often forgotten urban renewal program called Vista Verde beginning in the late 1960s. Using Federal funds made available for the purpose, large “slum” areas were cleared and replaced with new housing, highways and parking lots. Thousands of residents and hundreds of business were forced to move. The market was smack dab in the middle of this zone. While the Farmers Market/Haymarket itself was not directly affected, many of the supporting businesses in the buildings around the market were forced out, as were many of the families who lived and worked in the surrounding neighborhood. The outdoor market at Washington Square was permanently closed. This outdoor market was never fully covered with a canopy by the City and was a poster child of the kind of dirty, anti-modern business that urban renewal programs sought to remove. As part of urban renewal, pieces of land forcibly purchased by the government was re-privatized as apartment complexes and commercial space, all built on a suburban model of wide streets with plenty of surface parking. One of these chunks was the former Washington Square, which today is the La Quinta on Dolorosa St (don’t worry, there’s plenty of parking!). If you’ve ever wondered why the western end of downtown is such a windswept ghost town compared to other parts of downtown even today, this is a principal reason.
Photo taken minutes before disaster. Aerial view of Vista Verde Urban Renewal Area, San Antonio, Texas, March 1968. The Farmers Market building is the long shed in the middle, which is today’s El Mercado. In the bottom right we can see Washington Square has already been cleared for use as parking. About 50% of the other buildings in this photo would be demolished within a decade.
General Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections.
The final and biggest nail in the coffin was the general macroeconomic picture for the small family farm in the America beginning in the 1960s. As documented elsewhere, this was the era of the Nixon Administration’s “Get big or get out” agricultural policy. The government was now in the business of supporting large, mechanized cereal crops, and nothing else. The small mixed vegetable farm essentially disappeared during that decade. With the collapse of local produce markets, remaining producers had no choice but to sell to the new place San Antonians bought produce; the supermarket. On paper this was a triumph for consumers, who received consistent produce at low, predictable prices in a clean, air conditioned environment. This was a disaster for producers, who were now completely dependent on one or two large customers to buy their harvest. Whereas before producers received 100% of the retail sale price of the produce selling directly to consumers, now they were only receiving a fraction of that. Over time this forced a consolidation of vegetable growing into large “efficient” agribusinesses that are kept afloat by imports from places with a year round growing season and cheap labor abroad (Mexico) or cheap Federally subsided irrigation water (California).
By the 1970, the once thriving produce market was all but dead. In an effort to save at least some vestige of the City’s market history (or at least the building), part of the Vista Verde funding was used to re-imagine the Farmers Market as a sort of a fantasy version of a Mexican craft market. This dovetailed nicely with City leader’s long term drive to promote economic development through tourism, and having that kind of sanitized market fit in well with the “exoctic but safe” vibe that our tourist industry has always been keen to promote. The reality of course is that it turned into a tourist junk market. Not only are products not even remotely local, I have serious doubts that the majority of it is even from Mexico. Walking down the aisles at El Mercado today might as well be the same as scrolling through Alibaba or Amazon. Knowing the history of the place and seeing what it’s become, I can’t even really drive by this building today without getting an upsetting combination of nauseous and sad.
So that’s the state of play in 2024. The produce market is dead. Long live… H-E-B? Wal-Mart? Whole Foods? Does it matter? You can get a Certified OrganicTM melon or whatever at Central Market, after all. I could write a book on why that’s a misguided attitude, but this post already feels like it’s approaching book length so I’ll keep this short:
The produce sold in these “dirty” open air markets was nutritionally better for you than anything you would get at the supermarket today. If you don’t believe me, ask the New York Times. Supermarkets are a terrible way to buy fresh food if you value taste and nutrition. Once a piece of produce is picked, it’s dying, and every hour it’s off the plant is a perceptible drop in flavor and nutritional value. Modern produce operations prioritize making the food look good and really don’t care about anything else. Additionally, before the 1940s, by default it was all organic because that’s all we had!
Every person photographed in this post is self-employed. They have a huge amount of autonomy on how to live their daily lives compared to the modern employee of the Agribusiness or Supermarket. I strongly believe that the more independent people we have in society that aren’t dependent on a faceless corporation for a paycheck, the stronger our society will be. It’s also proven to make people more happy and have higher job satisfaction. The old produce markets supported many thousands of people in those kinds of occupations.
Lastly, it’s fun. Fun is important. Consider how much of our economy is devoted to fun. And I don’t just mean “fun” things like amusement parks. Americans drive big trucks and live in big houses for fun. It gives people a lot of pleasure. It’s very clearly not the most economically efficient way to live, but we do it anyway because lots of us think it’s fun. A good produce market that’s still in business in 2024 in the Western world operates on a similar basis because technically nothing about any farmers market, good or bad, new or old, makes any sense. Everything is often somewhat expensive and sometimes unnecessary (looking at you, organic dog treat vendors). But fun things can have economic value, too. Can you imagine Seattle without Pike’s Place or Philadelphia without Reading Terminal? It’s part of gives a place its character, and that matters. Should food be “efficient” and joyless? We don’t apply the same standard to consumer products, why should we with something as important for the health of our bodies and culture as food?
Hopefully I will have time to cover soon what I think we can do to bring great markets back to this great city. In the meantime, consider signing up for our Community Supported Agriculture program. Until we get our markets back into decent shape, this is your best option to get consistent local, fresh food at a good value!
