City of Chicago

Municipal Reference Library                                                                                                  Frederick Rex, Librarian

1005, City Hall

The South Water Street Market

(Apr. 20, 1938)

A visit on Tuesday afternoon, April 26, to the South Water Street Market continues our two weeks of tours chiefly devoted to market areas in Chicago. The original South Water Street Market was situated on the south bank of the Chicago River where Wacker Drive is today. No one can remember when the Market was started. It grew up with the city and was there when Chicago was just a mud-hole. The Market was ideally situated to transport merchandise by way of railroad or the river. But by 1900 Chicago had grown immensely and the Market seriously interfered with traffic. Congested, lined with horses and wagons, South Water Street made in impassable barrier along the entire south river front. In 1930, the Chicago Plan Commission  (a civic project to beautify the city) began legal action, determined to move the market to a less conspicuous part of town. The South Water Street Market merchants fought every effort to move them. The legal battle raged for four years but finally the produce merchants received the court’s decision and began to look for a new site.

            Time was short and possible locations for a market were few. Finally the South Water Market Trust, a hastily-organized group of commission merchants, decided upon the Valley District, then notorious as a center of criminal life and activity. Here were tremble-down houses which could be bought for a song, and the loop to be brief was far away to the comparatively cheap. Transportation facilities were not bad, and every railroad terminus in the city was within a mile and a half.

            Receiving the court order in January 1925, the Market made frantic preparations to move. The architects, B. K. Goodman and Company, worked feverishly on plans for the new buildings. The people living in the Valley clung so long to their ramshackle homes that the old houses were practically torn down over their heads. Six months later the merchants took possession of their new quarters, 166 stores or units, built at the cost of seventeen million dollars.

            The modern market covers eight square blocks, bounded by Racine Avenue on the west; Morgan Street on the east; 14^th Street on the north; and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on the south. The streets were made 100 feet wide and the alleys 42 feet. It was expected that the new market would service Chicago well for the next 25 years at least. Soon it was discovered, however, that the streets were not wide enough, and today the market is badly crowded.

            Street in the South Water Market are the only unnamed streets in the city. A place in the market is simply “South Water Market.” The various units are identified by numbers having no connection with the city’s regular street numbering system.

            The Market Service Association grew out of the South Water Street Trust and is today the official mouthpiece of the South Water Market. The Association, controlled by eleven merchants who make up the Board of Director enforces regulations by inflicting penalties upon any delinquent owner of a commission house.

            Regulations drawn up by the Service Association require all unit (store) owners to pay a monthly fee, for which they receive watchman service, and such equipment as street-lights and canopies.