Artvoice: What The Market Will Bear
(Geoff Kelly – Artvoice) Noon on a Tuesday at the Broadway Market. Outside a man is hawking athletic socks, while another challenges passersby to a chess game in the scant shade of a maple tree in a concrete planter. About a half dozen people stand in line at a hot dog stand. The corner is a meeting place, alive with action and conversation. Traffic is brisk, on the street and on the sidewalk.
That’s the outside. Inside, the market is quiet and nearly empty. But for the PA system playing classic rock, you could hear a clock ticking. Twice in the past two weeks I’ve visited the Broadway Market at lunchtime and counted no more than a dozen customers in the cavernous main hall. Half of those are elderly men and women sipping coffee from paper cups in the food court. At least a third of the active vendors left in the market—there are 34 right now, compared to more than 50 just 10 years ago—are shuttered. Excluding the Save-a-Lot grocery store and the market’s four lunch counters, which were busier, I counted six cash transactions between customers and vendors in one hour.
Six sales in an hour. Fewer vendors, fewer choices. What’s wrong with this place? The Broadway Market has survived 120 years, and the last 30 have been tough, but never has its prognosis seemed so grim. Where are the customers? Why have so many vendors leave? Is it the neighborhood, whose economic decline mirrors that of most every other East Side neighborhood? Is it racism? Is it competition from suburban supermarkets? Is it poor public transportation and the market’s distance from the downtown core? God knows it can’t be lack of parking—thanks to a car-centric reconstruction of the market in 1late 1950s, there are 1,300 parking spaces in the attached ramp, which are almost always mostly unused.
Related B-F-A Articles…
- Common Council adopts bills supporting Broadway Market reorganization
- Documents regarding Broadway Market situation
- If Buffalo can’t save the Broadway Market, it is hard to see that its economic future has much hope at all
- Broadway Market plans forum to rebut claims that it may close
- Broadway Market managers seek funding from city
- Troubled Times
