I was happy to hear the interior of the 2000 Pennsylvania Ave. NW building is becoming a food hall, calling itself Western Market in honor of the marketplace that formerly existed nearby. I’ve visited Eastern Market over the years but never realized it was part of L’Enfant’s original plan that also included Center Market and Western Market. But before I get too excited about the upcoming Western Market revival, please tell me: Were these locations ever used as slave markets or were they historically just a place for buying food and other consumer goods?
— Jim Blitz, Cabin John
It is a sad fact of history that there was a time when a food market could also accommodate a human market.
That market was Center Market, which once stood on Pennsylvania Avenue between Seventh and Ninth streets NW, where today stands the building that houses a document that begins “All men are created equal.”
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As the name suggests, Center Market was the most centrally located of the capital’s various food emporia. However, Pierre L’Enfant did not include any of them in his original plan of the city, said Don Alexander Hawkins, historian and cartographer.
“He had landing places on the [Tiber Creek] canal where one might assume a market might appear — and in fact Center Market did — but he didn’t place any markets himself,” Hawkins said.
What L’Enfant intended for the spot that became the Center Market was a grand fountain. Just south of that, he sketched the canal widening in a way that suggested it would make a good spot for offloading merchandise, something he alluded to in a letter to George Washington.
Center Market came about because of NIMFYism: Not in my front yard. There was an earlier market at Lafayette Square — where, not so incidentally, enslaved people were kept — that residents thought was unsightly. They pushed for a new market, farther away.
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This was Center Market, the first iteration of which debuted in 1802. As it happened, the nearby canal turned out to be more nuisance than convenience. When it flooded, it engulfed the market, which soon got the nickname “Marsh Market.” (The canal was paved over in 1871 with what became Constitution Avenue NW.)
Enslaved people were sold at Center Market, said historian C.R. Gibbs. It was just one part of the city’s slave trade infrastructure. Nearby hotels had cells in their basements or courtyards so enslaved people could be locked up while their owners conducted business in town. And two slave auction sites — Robey’s Tavern and the Yellow House — were across the Mall from Center Market, where the FAA headquarters is now.
To the west was Western Market, the first iteration of which opened a few years after Center Market near 20th and H streets NW.
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Were humans ever sold at Western Market? Gibbs, whose books include “Black Georgetown Remembered,” thinks not. The reason: “People can essentially walk across the bridge to the thriving slave markets of Georgetown,” he said.
Georgetown was convenient to the plantations of Montgomery County. It was also a busy port. Both operations used enslaved workers, who were bought and sold at McCandless’s Tavern at High and Bridge streets, today’s Wisconsin and M.
It appears that, like Western Market, Eastern Market at Seventh and C streets SE was not a site of slave sales. But Gibbs said the city had what we might call “pop-up” slave markets. Visitors to Washington remarked upon stumbling into ad hoc auctions of enslaved people, including at the foot of Capitol Hill, he said.
And enslaved African Americans were bought and sold in another Washington neighborhood: Alexandria, which from 1800 to 1847 was part of the capital. One dealer, Franklin and Armfield, was at 1315 Duke St. Another was four blocks up Duke Street, across from what is now a Whole Foods.
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“I always try to give that as a landmark,” said Gibbs.
The slave trade in Washington was abolished in 1850. Center Market closed in 1931 to make way for the National Archives. Western Market moved in 1873 to a new brick building at 21st and K streets NW. It was demolished in 1967. Only Eastern Market — designed, like Center Market, by Adolf Cluss and completed in 1873 — remains.
Gibbs said that the conjunction of markets — for things and for people — created powerful ironies and stirring stories. Before the market at Lafayette Square was supplanted, an enslaved woman named Alethia Browning Tanner earned enough money selling vegetables there to purchase freedom for herself and other members of her family.
And among the African American vendors at Center Market after the Civil War were some who had once been enslaved.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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