Paris’s famed Les Halles Marketplace was once a centuries-old bustling wholesale market where vendors from all over the city could sell their produce and wares. Today, it is a mega mall.
Faneuil Hall Marketplace, home of the well loved North Market and South Market, is sort of the Les Halles of Boston. It is centuries old, an enormous tourist attraction and home to pushcart vendors of food and souvenirs one could only find in Boston. However, it too may be sacrificed to the whims of big business.
Plans have been in the works for a Marketplace Makeover since New York City-based real estate giant Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. acquired the property in October 2011. Their blueprints lay out a complete modernization of the market, including replacing the food court with movable bars and sit-down restaurants, building various retail operations and maybe even constructing a boutique hotel. Ideally, these renovations will skyrocket tourism and increase traffic in the popular historical destination.
As cool as these changes sound, they leave very little room for the current tribe of pushcart vendors scattered throughout the marketplace. This concern has led Boston City Councilors Stephen Murphy and Michael Flaherty on Wednesday to request a public hearing to discuss the impact these vendors, who are virtually small business owners, have on the city’s economy. Many other councilors agreed and Boston’s Committee on Economic Development, Planning & Labor will consider the implications, according to the Associated Press.
“If we truly believe in small businesses, we have to support these pushcart vendors,” said Councilor Tito Jackson in a Wednesday Boston City Council meeting.
The Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. has not commented on the effect modernization will have on the pushcart vendors, but it isn’t too difficult to make a few educated guesses about their fate. As with any remodeling, once a building is made nicer, the rent inevitably goes up. Their rent is already pricey. Food court vendors pay about $10,000 a month for 350 square feet, and pushcarts pay about $4,100 a month, according to The Boston Globe.
Furthermore, between movable bars and this fancy new boutique hotel, will there even be room for all the wooden pushcarts currently occupying the space? There are few people who would be happy to see the Boston Chowda Co. cart be replaced with some kind of neo-fusion sushi bar.
Faneuil Hall Marketplace is located in Government Center, a neighborhood that has already been thoroughly modernized. Between the Urban Outfitters and Hollister Co. down the block, Faneuil Hall is one of the only places left that still recalls the charm of Old Boston. And maybe it’s a little dusty, but the rusticity of the marketplace accounts for a large portion of its intrigue.
Still, if there is one thing tourists love, it’s shopping, and if the stores in Faneuil Hall Marketplace become more commercialized (or more expensive), they are sure to bring in more money. Additionally, the renovations will most likely make the place look a lot nicer, even if a little too shiny, and the additional traffic these changes will bring to the location will probably provide a nice little boost to the economy.
But then, cities are about more than just the economy. Culture and history make up the pulse of a great city, and Boston is a great city. A sound appreciation of culture means understanding that not everything has to be updated to be great. Faneuil Hall Marketplace recalls the long-ago Boston that we may never see, but being there can give us a glimpse into the world that brought us the Boston we have today.
“We want to create an environment that’s active 12 months a year,” Barry Lustig, an Ashkenazy vice president told The Boston Globe in September. “Our intent is to make this a relevant property to the people of Boston, where families and couples can be in the kind of space you can’t find anywhere else.”
Isn’t Faneuil Hall already a place one couldn’t find anywhere else? With the few other open-air markets in the United States going extinct, the survivors, such as Faneuil Hall, should be cherished, not revamped. You know what kind of place someone could find anywhere else? The commercialized shopping mecca Faneuil Hall is slated to become.
