Hay Market blurb

Tucked into the dense blocks of small neighboring bars and restaurants, Hay Market seems nothing but a tiny nook within the small city of Boston. This is the city’s great outdoor market, where you can buy everything fresh: from fruits and vegetables to exotic spices, and fish, just straight off the boat. It is everything your typical supermarket is not—cheap, loud, and in your face. As if the city’s traffic sound waves have not penetrated enough through this exuberant maze of a marketplace—it could be the obnoxious Bostonians roaring from the central artery, or it could be that all the vendors are simply tone deaf. Vendors tend to shout their wares. Like a pair of squawking crows, they yell at each other, endlessly repeating their duets as they try to entice customers; sometimes to get more produce to the stand, maybe even to one-up each other…and the traffic. The goal is to get the jostling pedestrians to stop, look, and hopefully purchase.
On the corner of Marshall and Blackstone streets, its peak of activity falls only on Thursday through Saturdays from about 7 AM till 5 PM. Contrary to the loud, self-promoting vendors in the midst of a lively mob of produce buyers, on days like Sundays where everything tends to slow down for everyone, it is nothing different than the day after a New Year’s celebration in Times Square, New York: silent, streets riddled with rubbish and remnants of fruits and vegetables smashed into the pavement that were once wholesome and succulent to the eyes.
It was quite breezy on that Sunday evening when I went, having gone to Hay Market only three times in my lifetime (all three times fell on a Saturday, if I remembered correctly), unknowing of the schedule of open stalls, my anticipation of bustling souls moving about in the market as I peeked around the corner of the subway entrance, soon became a disheartened sight. A sudden nostalgia of Christmas day, eight years old: running down the stairway as fast as my stubby legs could carry one foot over the other, and as fast as my tiny hands could place onto the largest box of present written ‘To Jonathan: from Santa,’ unmerciful clawing and tearing away of the neatly wrapped box in hopes to uncover the long awaited Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure set (the one that comes with the turtle truck and secret hiding place). Only to find a green wool sweater and a pair of striped tube socks.
It was barren. I even did a double-take to see if I was in the correct location, not to mention I went into tourist mode and unfolded the 11x17 aerial map I had printed out. The area was much unexpected, and the slow, but unforgiving breezes placed well in the lethargic mood. Maybe I haven’t been here for a while, or maybe I should really take the time to explore more of Boston’s nooks and crannies, but if I were to walk here another day along the same streets, anything but the overhead sign indicating ‘Hay Market Pizza’ would not have come to my attention.
Though not as high-spirited as I expected to be, I was glad to be immersed in a plethora of a material pallet. Be it a photographer, an artist, or even a designer [architect], you cannot help but to appreciate what this marketplace has to offer in its naked state. As I walked from the Hay Market T station, just as I stepped onto market area, I was welcomed with a crosswalk consisting of bronze fruit peels and other detritus smashed onto pavement, which reminded me of Mags Harries’s bronze depiction of a gathering of stray gloves, tumbling down between the (infinite) escalators in the Porter Square T station, in Cambridge.
It felt like a gateway to a Boston where the great quality of products one is trying to sell, does not necessarily have to reflect the appearance of his/her storefront. Having to walk underneath the eroded steel and worn out wood overhang that connects from store to store was an uneasy task—I was actually waiting for a piece to fall on me. What also interested me was that, it was also a gateway to a joining of cultures—how many places are we aware of to have the Middle-East, Italy, India, and Ireland all on the same street? The old brick buildings that held together these markets are masked by a series of corroded and tainted metal plate, garage-door like entrances—on nights if I were to walk passed during after hours, I would have guessed these were individual public storage facilities. For those storefronts that did not have metal-plated doors, showed displays of graffiti on their chipped wooden facades. Even on the brick facades had signs of water-damaged erosion, though, much to my surprise had a somewhat enchanting green-blue hue. What attracted me to the marketplace the most was its concept of grittiness as a whole—and even in its current conditions people do not seem to mind, and has some how made that parcel into its own natural habitat of delivering some of the most freshest produce.
Hay Market is also a public threshold of smells. The sense of smell would probably be the most sensitive of the five senses, other than sight as you circulate through the marketplace. It was almost as if specific parts of the parcel had its unique scent. Store fronts such as the meat and fish markets are mostly recognizable by its raw scent. Passing the pizza market, hunger might entail, and you’re almost unconsciously succumbing yourself into the sweetened scent of tomato, dough and pepperoni. As you head down towards the Middle-Eastern and Indian markets, the scent does not seem to reveal itself until you walk downstairs, that is when your nose starts to travel through the Cardamom, Tumeric, and Sumac spices, not to mention the ever-so aromatic carrot and pomegranate soaps. Just as you walk across the main road and onto the greenery where a lot of the stalls and crates are stored in poorly secured metal fences—the area quickly transitions from decadent scents of produce and spices turns into stomach churning, not so much for the faint of heart, smells of malt liquor and urine.
In its barest state, Hay market presents itself a unique character. It exposes many of its hidden beauties which can be a pallet for many design inspirations.

-Jon