Alicia Ardon
C-Studio
A walk through Haymarket
As you walk up to Haymarket, you slowly start noticing people grouped up with in the space. Tents are up with a variety of different things out to sell. The vendors are yelling out to every one hoping someone will buy their products. Up early in the morning setting up their tents waiting for the morning crowd to buy starting at 6 A.M. You start notice the different cultures and languages that surround you. Small path ways lead the crowd around from stand to stand, some selling the same things others selling different. People bumping into each other not apologizing, some in a rush others just wondering around. It seems as though rush hour adds an effect to the commotion at 5 P.M. Work is out and people want be able to get their produce quick and go home. College students stand around, asking each other if they need any thing to bring back to their dorms. Noise comes from the cars coming from the Surface Artery Street that lays parallel to the market. From the market place you can see parcel 8 of the green way with it's green landscape as people walk along the side walk and through it. At the street edge of Haymarket, trash trucks come and the vendors start to pile their empty produce boxes up. As I first came in, I could smell fruit and vegetables, now I smell garbage, a lot of it. Behind the tents lay boxes and boxes of different fruits and vegetables ready to be put on to the stands as they sell. Vendors start to bargain with prices as they are ready and eager to pack up and leave. You seeing the sellers and the buyers interacting with one another, making deals and handling money. If you try to talk to the vendors, they are busy acting quick and interrupting your conversation to try to get peoples attention in the crowd as they try to sell something. They tell you that two times a week ( Friday and Saturday) 52 weeks a year is enough for them, but they profit from selling their products pretty well otherwise they wouldn't be there. As you walk around Haymarket, it is surrounded by tall skyscrapers where you see brick, concrete, stone and glass where other buildings are reflecting off of one another. As you walk around the area, you notice the groups of people making noise and having fun at the bars around the corner. The alley along side the market place have people walking up and down it to get through. Standing in the middle of the path ways with in the market place causes disturbance in the pedestrian traffic flow. Take a picture and you have people wanting to get in or out of it. Being in the Haymarket place made me feel unorganized, rushed, and not being able to concentrate on one thing because there is just so much going on at once in such a small compacted space. One vendor stated that the redesign on Haymarket would be the one thing they need, it is an atomic bomb as of right now.
2 comments:
Great observations. Again, I felt a sense of what it was like to be at the site. Interesting that many of the vendors think a redesign is a good idea. I wonder who runs the market? Who owns the property, etc? What time was your visit? It's unclear because you mention 6 am and 5pm.
I would love to know more about the breakdown? Did you notice some vendors were better at selling all their goods? Were there a lot of after work shoppers? Great observations and glad you talked to some of the vendors.
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