Smell of Eastern Market Relocates to New Space

Map It:  Eastern Market 

WALKING NORTH ON 7TH STREET SE from Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday morning, two Eastern Markets appeared in the distance. On the left, the skeleton of a new roof was taking shape above the burned-out historic South Hall, part of an effort to repair the damage from an April 30 fire. To the right, adjacent to Hines Junior High School, was the temporary East Hall structure, the site of the relocated market, which opened to the public this weekend.

And although the new tent-like structure doesn't have the same charm as South Hall, the place seems oddly familiar. Yes, the vendors are back — Market Lunch, however, was not open for business on Saturday — but there's something more. All you had to do was open your nose. With temperatures approaching 100 degrees on Saturday, you could smell that familiar pungent stewing odor of meat and fish even before you entered the place. If East Hall ever had a new-car scent, it was surely overpowered by market forces in no time flat.

The true scent test will come sometime in the next two years — we hope — when the old market building's South Hall reopens. As The Post's Philip Kennicott wrote in May, the old market "reeked of a century of sour milk and fish and fried food." Of course, most architects aren't in the business of making their creations malodorous.

But that's precisely the point, according to Kennicott:

The test for the neighborhood, and for the city, will be to resist anything that changes the social character of the building as it was on any given Saturday afternoon. The challenge will be to rebuild where it was, as it was, and what it felt like.

Well, East Hall doesn't look like the old place by any stretch, but the relocated market is beginning to feel — and certainly smell — like the old South Hall. And that's a step in the right direction for a location that's long been then heart and soul of Capitol Hill.

» "Flocking Back for Beef and More" [WaPo]

EARLIER:
» "Eastern Market, Corner Store and Cornerstone" [WaPo]
» "Across D.C., Mourning One Terrible Monday" [Free Ride/Express]

Photos by James M. Thresher/The Washington Post