By Ken Ringle
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, May 1, 2007

In the spring of 1971, about eight months after I'd moved to Washington, I got a call from an old friend, also newly arrived. We had planned to buy a house together somewhere, maybe in Foggy Bottom where I was then living. But he was calling from Capitol Hill.

"Have you spent any time in this neighborhood?" he said, excitement in his voice. "Have you seen the Eastern Market?"

I hadn't. But a few hours later I was wandering with him and an equally smitten real estate agent among the vegetable stalls and meat counters of the market's great hall, transfixed between the fragrance highs of the cheese vendor and the bakery. We hadn't even made it yet to the crab cakes at the Market Lunch, but I knew I was home.

In the 36 years since, I have never lived more than three blocks away from the market. I can't even imagine doing so. For there is no place, absolutely no place in Washington, that so anchors and fuels its surrounding neighborhood, serving as real markets have for millennia in every land and culture as temples of commerce, cuisine and sociology. Certainly some places in the District come sort of close -- Ben's Chili Bowl in Northwest and Dupont Circle on warm weekends, for example.

But until a fire early yesterday, Eastern Market, the sole survivor of a network of 19th-century farmers' markets in the city, was unique in its exuberant vitality and diversity and welcoming embrace. You could buy a hog maw and some collard greens at the Eastern Market or pumpkin agnolotti and wild boar paté. You could purchase organic eggs from a farmer who knew the chicken, or stock up on tomatoes and zucchini from Martha Fowler, a handsome woman with a face Norman Rockwell would have loved. Her family has brought produce to the market since it opened in 1873.

Blacks, whites, straights, gays, young people, old people, children and dogs throng the place all week and especially on weekends when the farm trucks back up under the green metal shed roof outside. On Sundays, the vendors of postcards, jewelry, rugs, carvings, fabrics and miscellaneous junk so overwhelm the sidewalks the place starts to look like Saigon. Where will all those people go now? What about the old guy who's always wheezing out an off-key version of "Satin Doll" on the saxophone? Even if they rebuild it, this fire feels like a death in the family.

Perhaps most distinctive about Eastern Market was its authenticity. It was an uncompromising monument to a District of Columbia now barely remembered, a city with the tin-roof stamp of a Chesapeake Bay region not yet culturally colonized by mass marketers from somewhere else.

There was, for example, no air conditioning even around fish counters fragrant with rockfish and softshell crabs. What cooling it had on summer days came from air sucked in through the doors and windows and exhausted through the metal rooftop vents high above. Sweaty foodies and dilettante shoppers who braved that environment at Seventh and C streets SE didn't want it any other way. Proposals to air condition and "modernize" the place were repeatedly shouted down at neighborhood meetings over the years. Capitol Hillians loved the Eastern Market just the way it was. Leave it alone, they always said.

And it wasn't just the locals. The enormous Saturday breakfast lines for pancakes at the Market Lunch were a Washington institution. They even, God help us, drew occasional tourist buses. Political candidates and causists buttonholed, leafleted and petitioned the crowds at the market. There was always ferment, almost never conflict.

One reason we patrons opposed change at the Market was fear it would disrupt the personal nature of our neighborhood commerce. For example, we might have been able to find vegetables cheaper at Giant or Safeway than at Thomas Calomiris and Sons in Eastern Market. But they wouldn't have the smell of the farm soil still on the beet roots. Nor would Safeway insist you leave with a complimentary banana or handful of dates, offer advice on kalamata olives and the preparation of Greek chicken or advance you a dollar on credit if you discovered yourself short of cash.

There are other cheese vendors in Washington, but none with the zesty banter of Jack the tyrophile at Bowers Dairy Products, who handed out free tastes of Asiago, Manchego, Double Gloucester and Gruyere along with good-natured insults and occasional cheesy jokes.

What changes Eastern Market did experience have been supremely human in nature. One of the best occurred more than a decade ago when Jose Canales from El Salvador bought out a retiring butcher and set out to infuse the market with Latino flavors and flair. With tireless industry, unquenchable cheer and a spirited group of daughters and friends, he brought in sausages from Mexico, Argentina, Portugal and Brazil, sold incomparable empanadas and burritos and a uniquely incendiary jalapeño mayonnaise for his rotisserie chickens. He soon had a second meat counter and even a restaurant across the street.

It is people like that that Capitol Hillians were mourning yesterday as firefighters and city officials poked through the sooty great hall under the flame-punctured metal roof.

Just across the street a class of kindergartners from Peabody Elementary a few blocks away sat cross-legged on the grass with sober faces, drawing elongated fire engines and jagged broken windows on their art class pads.

"The children were doing a project on Eastern Market before the fire," teacher Sarah Burke explained. "We wanted a subject that really impacted the neighborhood they know, and these kids are in and out of the neighborhood all the time. One boy in the class has breakfast with his dad every Wednesday at the Market Lunch."

The children's earlier artwork on the market was hanging in the gallery at the market's north end at the time of the fire. "It's still there," Burke said. "It wasn't hurt."