Description
Book SynopsisThe untold story of America's wholesale food business. In nineteenth-century America, municipal deregulation of the butcher trade and state-incorporated market companies gave rise to a flourishing wholesale trade. In Movable Markets, Helen Tangires describes the evolution of the American wholesale marketplace for fresh food, from its development as a bustling produce district in the heart of the city to its current indiscernible place in food industrial parks on the urban periphery. Tangires follows the middlemen, those intermediaries who became functional necessities as the railroads accelerated the process of delivering perishable food to the city. Tracing their rise and decline in the wake of a deregulated food economy, she asks: How did these people, who occupied such key roles as food distributors and suppliers to the retail trade, end up exiled to urban outskirts? Moving into the early twentieth century, she explains how progressive city planners and agricultural economists r
Trade ReviewTangires's careful attention to physical market spaces brings them to life for readers interested in architectural history or urban planning.
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Business History ReviewHelen Tangires tells the story of a time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when wholesale urban food markets mattered very much to the average consumer.
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Journal of Social HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Acronyms
Introduction
Part I. Open Entry
1. Shelter for the Middleman
2. The Produce District: Design by Improvisation
Part II. Consolidation
3. Planning the Wholesale Terminal Market
4. The Nation's Capital: Testing Ground for the Wholesale Trade
Part III. New Frontiers
5. The New Deal: Birth of the State-Sponsored Regional Market
6. Industrial Parks and the USDA Paradigm
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
