Pike Place Market
After our lunch at Seafood City, Val, Danny and I continued on our way to the iconic Pike Place Market, Seattle’s most popular tourist destination and the 33rd most visited tourist attraction in the world, with more than 10 million annual visitors. Overlooking the Elliott Bay waterfront on Puget Sound, it is one of the oldest continuously operated public farmers’ markets in the United States.
Opened on August 17, 1907, it is named after Pike Place, the central street which runs northwest from Pike Street to Virginia Street on the western edge of Downtown Seattle. The market, serving as a place of business for many small farmers, craftspeople and merchants, is built on the edge of a steep hill and consists of several lower levels located below the main level.
Flower stands
Each level features seemingly endless rows of flower stands, a variety of unique shops such as antique dealers, comic book and collectible shops, small family-owned restaurants, and one of the oldest head shops in Seattle. The upper street level contains wader-clad fishmongers, farm fresh produce stands and craft stalls operating in the covered arcades.
High school batchmates Val Sagado, Danny Macaventa and the author at Pikes Place Market
Home to nearly 500 residents who live in eight different buildings throughout the Market, the market’s mission and founding goal is allowing consumers to “Meet the Producer.” Year-round, local farmers and craftspeople sell in the arcades from tables they rent, on a daily basis, from the Market.
Cheese Box
In the past, most of these buildings have been low-income housing. However, some of them, such as the Livingston Baker apartments, no longer offers these. The Market is run by the quasi-government Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA). The first Starbucks store, founded in 1971 originally at its location at 2000 Western Ave., moved, in 1977, one block away to 1912 Pike Place where it has been in continuous operation ever since.
Check out “Pike Place Starbucks Store”
Sosio’s Produce
Val directed me to the Pike Place Fish Market, one of the Market’s major attractions, where employees threw three-foot long salmon and other fish to each other rather than passing them by hand. This tradition started when the fishmongers got tired of having to walk out to the Market’s fish table to retrieve a salmon each time someone ordered one.
Pure Food Fish Market
The owner realized it was easier to station an employee at the table and, when a customer orders a fish, an employee at the Fish Market’s ice-covered fish table picks up the fish and hurls it over the countertop, where street buskers catches it and preps it for sale.
Pit Bar-B-ue
This attraction of the flying fish has appeared in an episode of Frasier, the television sitcom that was shot on location. It has also been featured on The Learning Channel (TLC) and the opening credits of MTV‘s The Real World: Seattle. When the Seahawks host games at nearby CenturyLink Field, this attraction also appears on numerous prime-time installments of NFL games.
Oriental Market
A taste of the Philippines can be found at Oriental Mart, a three-generation, family-owned business. A mainstay of the Market opened in 1971 by Milagros Apostol, it has an 18-seat lunch counter, operated by Leila “Ate Lei’ Apostol (Milagros’ daughter), serving up a selection of award-winning authentic Filipino cuisine and other novelties such as the salmon collar sinigang and her “Do You Trust Me Plate.”
Ulis Bierstube
Pike Place Market: 1st Ave. and Pike St., Seattle, Washington 98101, USA. Tel: (206) 682-7453. Website: www.pikeplacemarket.org. Coordinates: 47°36′34″N 122°20′30″W.