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Food Halls of America 2016
I
f San Francisco’s Ferry Building is the
model of the new American food hall,
Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market
may be the perfect example of the classic
American Food Hall. Reading Terminal
Market was built on the site of what had
been an open air market in the City of
Brotherly Love in 1859. Train service
arrived in 1893 with a rail terminal built
over what is now the modern day food hall
space. In its first few decades after that,
Reading Terminal Market boasted as many
as 380 merchants and it prospered—until
the Great Depression. Eventually rail
service was eliminated, and the market fell
into disrepair. Ownership passed to the
Pennsylvania Convention Authority in the
early 1990s, after which the project has
flourished. Interestingly, even though the
majority of vendors in the current Reading
Terminal Market are on month-to-month
leases, there has been extremely little
turnover in the past 20 years.
Today, Reading Terminal Market is home
to more than 60 restaurants and
merchants, including a number of
purveyors of Pennsylvania Dutch
specialties. While no longer a transit hub,
it is immediately accessible to local and
regional transit lines. Meanwhile, its
location under the state-of-the-art
Philadelphia Convention Center at the
heart of downtown positions it as one of
the city’s top tourism draws. While its mix
of vendors leans more towards street and
comfort foods than chef-driven concepts,
this project continues to evolve and thrive.
Reading Terminal Market