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California had long banned selling produce direct to consumers. What you're talking about is a longstanding sanctioned marketplace. It wasn't until the '70s that modern farmers got together with their pickup trucks, said screw it, and started setting up in empty parking lots as temporary events, not in the city but in suburbs. Cities got hold of the idea quick, though.
We can talk about park space being prioritized by cities, as a city idea. But as opposed to building structures the fact is, suburbs have more and better facilities. If the cities are in some way learning to offer more of these amenities because that's what's expected now compared to the suburban experience, all the better don't you think?
Roadside Stands, Markets, etc. were a forerunner of today's farmer's markets, which seem to me kind of "hipster-ish". My father's uncles had a roadside market back in the 1920s/30s. Somewhere in my archives, I have a picture of my father working at it, probably some time in the 1920s. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland had lots of "truck farms", where farmers loaded up the produce in a truck and took it into town to sell, sometimes at the local grocery stores. My great-uncles did that, as well. We have a few roadside stands here in CO that sell mostly vegetables, and home grown flowers, strawberries, etc.
Roadside farmstands are a different beast, at least legally. You can sell off your own property without permit. It's when you pack and vend produce on public property that you enter the realm of public laws, which were relaxed in the '70s to allow farmers to sell direct. There's nothing hip about it. It helps the farmers and the local economy.
Roadside markets are a different beast, at least legally. You can sell off your own property without permit. It's when you pack and vend produce on public property that you enter the realm of public laws, which were relaxed in the '70s to allow farmers to sell direct. There's nothing hip about it. It helps the farmers and the local economy.
I'm fine with it! I'm just saying, it's really not "new". The Farmer's Markets around here, including a big one in Boulder, have way more than locally-grown produce. Various restaurants have baked goods, they have produce from other locales, booths with people selling Mary Kay, jewelry, etc.
Well, no, of course selling vegetables isn't "new." But I guess I'm old enough to remember when there was no such thing as a modern farmers market, that is a direct-to-consumer no middleman temporary event. So the idea that cities invented them, have always had them, have always legalized them is just not (at least not California's) legislative history. Los Angeles has its big "Farmers Market" on Fairfax that's been around since early last century. That's not what I'm talking about.
Well, you could always look at it like this. It wasn't until the suburban lifestyle became popular around the start of the 60s that cities started becoming ghost towns and becoming run down. By the 70s, trains were almost dead and had to be saved by the government, freeways were being built/planned for almost every area of the country, and we hit the first oil crisis. By the 1990's, most of the smaller cities were completely dead and full of poor/crime...eventually this lifestyle began to collapse over the years until we have today the new urban movement to try and save ourselves from destroying our country and economy. Traffic is terrible, highway costs are huge, it takes forever to get somewhere, some cities still haven't made a come back, etc and yet people think urbanism is the problem.
No hunny...suburbanism was and is the problem...it didn't even take a decade to create more self indused problems than any city had caused in a century, and after about 50 years, it's been a big part in bringing our economy to it's knees.
City Beautiful did not occur in 1500-1600. Taking over parking lots is an urbanists response to the fact that American cities don't have adequate common space. When there is no village square or whatever you want to call it, you do the next best thing and take over a parking lot. Farmers markets are basically a throwback to something cities stopped doing, NYC declared war on anything that might resemble a farmers market in the 1930s.
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Well, you could always look at it like this. It wasn't until the suburban lifestyle became popular around the start of the 60s that cities started becoming ghost towns and becoming run down. By the 70s, trains were almost dead and had to be saved by the government, freeways were being built/planned for almost every area of the country, and we hit the first oil crisis. By the 1990's, most of the smaller cities were completely dead and full of poor/crime...eventually this lifestyle began to collapse over the years until we have today the new urban movement to try and save ourselves from destroying our country and economy. Traffic is terrible, highway costs are huge, it takes forever to get somewhere, some cities still haven't made a come back, etc and yet people think urbanism is the problem.
No hunny...suburbanism was and is the problem...it didn't even take a decade to create more self indused problems than any city had caused in a century, and after about 50 years, it's been a big part in bringing our economy to it's knees.
Trains were dead long before the 1970s. Streetcars companies were going bust 40-50 years before then. It does not take forever to get everywhere, that is actually one of the advantages. Highways are cheap compared to transit. The fact that we spend more on highways than transit in most parts of the country is because the overwhelming majority of people use highways and don't use transit. It is sort of like saying Hondas are more expensive than Ferraris because more is spent on Hondas than Ferraris. Funny how no one seems to be blaming urbanism but plenty of people blame suburbanism.
Well, no, of course selling vegetables isn't "new." But I guess I'm old enough to remember when there was no such thing as a modern farmers market, that is a direct-to-consumer no middleman temporary event. So the idea that cities invented them, have always had them, have always legalized them is just not (at least not California's) legislative history. Los Angeles has its big "Farmers Market" on Fairfax that's been around since early last century. That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm probably older than you, and I remember these direct-to-consumer no middleman (sic) temporary events. Farmers would set up a stand by the side of the road, and sell produce. This was common in PA, MD and WI as I recall it from my childhood. They do similar here in CO, and there are a few that have actual stores. Maybe CA is just "different".
There is a difference, though, between farmer's markets and produce stands (or the permanent produce markets, for that matter). Bunjee's talking about the modern farmer's markets. In California, I think the first was in Gardena, an LA suburb, although long before that places like the Farmer's Market on Fairfax DID at one point function a bit more like the farmer's markets that we know now. In any case, Gardena's the one that gets a lot of press, along with Santa Monica, and generally California gets a lot of credit for sparking the modern farmer's market movement, although I assume some of that is a combination of (a) revised state rules in the '70s (as well as some new federal laws/programs also from that time) coupled with (b) it's a HUGE state with a huge population, and (c) it's an agricultural state, making perfect conditions for the explosion of the contemporary farmer's market model. I'm still not sure that I'm convinced that farmer's markets are necessarily a suburban-driven movement, though, although I'm not well enough versed in the history to truly argue otherwise; still, it seems like suburbs were more likely to just have produce stands, while the actual markets first really took off in more urban areas.
Speaking of agriculture, did CSAs start out in the suburbs? My impression is that many of the early ones required picking up at the farm itself, which would seem to make it really only practical for those living in the outer suburbs (and therefore closer to the farms).
Trains were dead long before the 1970s. Streetcars companies were going bust 40-50 years before then. It does not take forever to get everywhere, that is actually one of the advantages. Highways are cheap compared to transit. The fact that we spend more on highways than transit in most parts of the country is because the overwhelming majority of people use highways and don't use transit. It is sort of like saying Hondas are more expensive than Ferraris because more is spent on Hondas than Ferraris. Funny how no one seems to be blaming urbanism but plenty of people blame suburbanism.
*resists urge to argue this*
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