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additions to the fabric of the French Market, think again. Almost from the market’s beginning, indigenous craftspeople offered their wares alongside the agricultural mainstays. “In the early American days there were several tribes to be found here including Indians from Bayou Lacombe as well as...from several tribes the remnants of which still existed in Mississippi, some of them came right to the French Market with their herbs and roots as well as basketry and beadwork and disposed of their merchandise,” writes Thompson, who also notes that vaudeville shows and traveling dentists were commonly seen throughout the mid- to late-1800s. “They were to be found in the Bazaar Market and also in the Vegetable Market and are remembered by many of the older merchants and inhabitants, as they were still to be seen up until 1910. The also sold…handmade pottery that did very well.” Beginning in the mid-1800s, a middle section of the French Market known as the Bazaar Market brought dry goods, fortune tellers, trinkets, flowers and knickknacks of all types from a diversity of sellers, contrib uting to the multicultural, ever-cacophonous sounds of space.

looped loosely over the graceful iron brackets that spring toward the roof. All the rich wonders of an almost tropic garden are piled about this column,” Cole observes. “Shallots savory enough to tempt one…hang in bouquets; crisp salads, chicory, lentil, leek, lettuce, are placed in dewy bunches next radishes, beets, carrots, butter-beans, alligator pears (a sort of mallow or squash), Brussels sprouts (idealized cabbage); posies of thyme and bay and sage and parsley; a bunch of pumpkins; and overhead, like big silver bells strung on cords, those everlasting garlics braided on their own beards.” J.P. Rouse even brought local produce — shallots, cabbage, potatoes — from nearby farms to sell at the Vegetable Market in the 1920s, establishing a precedent for a commitment-to-local through public market sales that set the stage for future generations to build a produce shipping company and, eventually, grocery stores. WARES, SHOWS AND EXTRAS If you thought that vendors selling items outside of the agricultural framework — hand-poured candles, artisanal soaps, local artists collectives like today’s Dutch Alley Artist’s Co-op — were only modern-day

Rose Nicaud, the French Market has been synonymous with the development of New Orleans’ coffee culture for over 200 years. After purchasing her freedom, Nicaud sold café au lait from a pushcart around the French Market beginning in the early 1800s, eventually saving up enough money for an uber-popular permanent coffee stand inside the French Market and inspiring countless other African American women along the way. VEGETABLES AND FRUITS If the Meat Market was the lionizing head of the French Market, then the stalls of the Vegetable Market (known, at times, as the “hall of vegetables”) were its ever-bustling, whipping tail. This became particularly true by the turn of the 20th century, when Italian immigrants, many of whom operated truck farms, largely ran the show at the Vegetable Market and provided ample, locally grown produce to a public that had become increasingly interested in adding greenery to a collective diet that was, until then, almost exclusively meat- and grain-based. “On the vegetable stalls…the faded red column that helps to support the roof wears at its capital a gray drapery of cobwebs

THE FRENCH MARKET New Orleans’ first public market, the French Market, was once the centerpiece of 34 public food markets, which formed

CAFÉ DU MONDE Café Du Monde is the oldest tenant of the French Market dating back to 1862.

COFFEE AND CHICORY Like Café Du Monde, most coffee and chicory brands originated in New Orleans, including Luzianne, CDM, French Market and Union, all of which are owned by Reily Foods. William B. Reily started a wholesale grocery business in Monroe, Louisiana, then moved to New Orleans in 1902, where he founded the Luzianne brand.

one of the most extensive municipal market systems in the United States.

26 ROUSES SUMMER 2023