The Long Road to Reviving Boston's Public Market

If the long-awaited Boston Public Market ever opens its doors – that is to say, if blueprints finally give way to blueberries – the city will end a half-century stretch without a year-round, indoor marketplace for local produce, meats, fish, breads, and crafts. Which is odd, given Boston’s place in history as the site of the colonies’ first marketplace in the 1630s and America’s first great market hall, Quincy Market, with roots going back to 1742. The absence of a public market in Boston has been called a “hole in the fabric of the city.”

By as early as next summer, officials say they want to start transforming the 26,000-square-foot first floor of a downtown Boston building (known as Parcel 7) into the hub of what they hope will be a bustling market district. The site market organizers chose is in a state-owned building along the Rose Kennedy Greenway, the popular strip of urban parkland that used to be Interstate 93. The infamous “Big Dig,” the most expensive public works project in American history, left numerous land parcels, the air rights over several tunnel on-ramps and a few buildings sitting empty along the central artery, many of which were originally promised to nonprofits and cultural institutions. (On the Greenway itself, several developers have backed out of plans to build facilities housing a museum celebrating Boston’s history, a center for arts and culture, an indoor arboretum, and a YMCA.)