Detroit is both a relatively ancient town, and a relatively young city, whose glory days came and went in a stunning flash that wasn’t even the length of one long lifetime.
This was, after all, once a frontier outpost, a fort founded by the French in 1701. Even a century ago there were still a few old French families, though that heritage is mainly gone now, except for a collection of mispronounced street names like Gratiot, Beaubien and Detroit itself.
Detroit was then British for a minute and then American, but the town grew slowly, a medium-sized city with fewer than 300,000 people when the 20th century began.
Thirty years later, there were more than a million and a half people, a figure which probably touched two million sometime in the early 1950s, before the freeways came and the city began to empty out into the suburbs. Back in the 1890s, before the assembly lines caused the city’s growth to explode, people came to Eastern Market on Saturday mornings to buy produce.
Close to a century and half later, they still do.
They come from the city and the suburbs, sometimes from many miles away, to shop at what is the largest open-air public market in the United States. Those running the market are proud of its history, though they sometimes don’t tell all of it; this was once a cemetery where the victims of a cholera epidemic were buried back in the early years of the 19th century.
Soon after, they moved the bodies — hopefully all of them — and this became a hay and wood market in the years before and during and after the Civil War. The farmers’ market moved here in 1891, and has been going strong ever since, in good times and in bad.
What many of the Saturday shoppers may not realize is that this has also evolved into a thriving wholesale food center over the past few decades. There are also a collection of trendy and homely restaurants, antique shops and specialty markets that are open every day but Sunday.
Twentieth century Detroit was a place where something new could be born, flourish, become an icon and die within a few decades. Nobody knows how many establishments have pictures on their walls of old Tiger Stadium, knocked down before its hundredth birthday, but as sacred a site as sports anywhere has to offer.
Ask some old Detroiter where Vernors was, or Sanders, and be prepared for stories. Most of those places are vanished now. The state fair flourished on Woodward for nearly as long as Eastern Market, but was closed nearly a decade ago by a governor who neither understood nor cared about Detroit, and left the state as soon as her time in office ended.
But Eastern Market is probably better and more of a draw than ever, given an added boost by a growing number of people who like to cook with food that came from close to home.
So do yourself a favor. Get up early. Come down here and have breakfast in some authentic place like Farmers’ Restaurant on Market Street, and then explore as much of the market’s 143 acres as your legs will allow, and then come back soon.
This isn’t a boutique or a pop-up. This is authentic, real, and stubbornly and newly vibrant — much like Detroit itself.
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