The earliest recorded open air market in Flint began on the southeast corner of Beach and Kearsley Streets during the summer of 1905. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the morning bustle of open wagons loaded with produce, crates of squawking chickens, and sides of beef on summer market days.
By 1912, after several summers of wagon ruts, and congestion on a busy city corner in a downtown beginning to embrace the automobile, leaders determined that the City Market should be moved out of downtown. They chose a plot of land across the river on the west side of Smith Street (Grand Traverse) along the north bank of the Flint River, and even erected a building (it’s still standing). But for some reason, ‘across the river’ didn’t work. During the years of WWI the market struggled, and never even opened in 1917.
After World War I, city leaders brought the market back onto the downtown side of the river, this time to the southeast corner of Harrison and Union Streets (the current site of the UM-Flint Thompson Library), where a large, drafty building was erected in 1920. Some of our current vendors remember stories from that building, as they travelled there with their parents as small children.
In 1940, built by WPA workers (President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration), the current market rose on the banks of the Flint River. The steel trusses supporting the roof are the originals from the 1920 Union Street building, wheeled over to the current site on railroad cars. When the trolley tracks which ran along Industrial Avenue next to the old Buick plant were torn up in 1939, they were recycled to form the pilings which anchor the current cement floor.
We know that the Market Master (a title out of the distant past) used to live on the second floor in space currently occupied by Steady Eddy’s and Art at the Market, that there used to be a police mini-station in what is now Thompson Creek Turkey Farm, and that there was a police vehicle storage area and firing range in today’s lower level Garden Room.
When you come to the market, wander around and imagine what the old place must have been like; it’s come a long way from those early days.
