Changing of the Guard

It with great pleasure that I announce effective Thursday January 14th that the Crescent City Farmer’s Market will take over operations from the Mid-City Green Market on Thursday afternoons from 3 to 7 in the parking lot of the American Can Company.

Welcome Back!

On Thursday April 17, 2008 the Mid-City Green Market, an organization I founded and ran single-handedly, held its first weekly Farmer’s Market in the parking lot of the American Can Company in front of Cork & Bottle. That first market met with great success and was chronicled all the way from Ian McNulty’s keyboard at Gambit to the BBC Food Programme.  That day was the happiest I had seen people in Mid-City since before the Federal Flood of ’05. Mid-City needed a market and it was an incredible feeling to provide one. In the 87 weeks since the first market, running the farmer’s market has been, without hesitation, the single most gratifying thing I’ve ever done.  However, the fact is its also been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and that’s why I reached out for help a few weeks ago.

When I first opened the market I did so with an inordinate amount of assistance from the Crescent City Farmers Market and without their assistance I’m not sure I could have gotten this off the ground. Understand that a farmer’s market is hardly an “if you build it they will come” sort of thing. Keeping all the plates spinning, so to say, with regards to making sure you have the right vendor mix, that the vendors you do assign will show up, that mother nature will not work against you and all sorts of other intricate, unplanned details is a fairly arduous task – and that’s just running the market on Market Day. The behind the scenes work of running a farmer’s market is far more difficult with regards to planning seasonally, promoting and advertising on a shoestring budget and maintaining a vibrancy.  It was even more difficult in my case since I was doing all of this solo.

Recently I decided that while we had a nice, pleasant market each week that the market could be so much more.  Really, my actual thought process was that Mid-City deserved a better market that served ALL citizens of the community.  I understood that by myself, with my time and resources I had taken the market as far as I could and that’s when I contacted Crescent City Farmer’s Market. They are the premier market organization in the region and with their community outreach and programs they were the single best organization to take the market back over. Not to be overlooked was the fact that they started the darned market in Mid-City and in many ways I felt I was just keeping alive what was rightfully theirs. As luck would have it they were at the point where they were ready to open up a third market and the timing of my request to them for help could not have come at a more opportune time for both parties.

Being met with a few blank stares when I’ve shared this news around the shop I have come to understand that in the years since Katrina a good many people have moved to Mid-City that weren’t around for those Crescent City Farmer’s Market days and don’t quite understand what it was all about. The Crescent City Farmer’s Market is the organization that holds markets on Tuesdays in Uptown and Saturdays in the Warehouse District.  They held their first weekly Farmer’s Market in Mid-City in 2001 and held them until the man-made flooding from failed levees shut it down. The Crescent City Farmer’s Market was one the – if not THE  – galvanizing weekly events in Mid-City prior to 29 August 2005.  The market was a gathering point for the entire community and their return to the American Can Company on Thursday afternoons is yet another sign that Mid-City is alive and well and signals that Mid-City is truly the heart of New Orleans.   The market is something we can call our own, something we as a community can rally around.  I thank all of you who have supported the market these past 87 weeks for helping keep the market going, but I thank even more the good people of the Crescent City Farmer’s Market who are coming back home to make Mid-City a better place to be.  Welcome home gang.

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