New Vancouver Farmers Market layout to fit vendors to a ‘t’

This year, the Vancouver Farmers Market will launch its 30th season by making room for the future: a planned apartment complex on West Sixth Street as well as the still-rising waterfront nearby.

Those developments are why the city of Vancouver asked the market to vacate West Sixth and shift its layout north, its managers said during an interview last week.

The “chess game” of rearranging 156 vendor booths isn’t exactly how Executive Director Jordan Boldt and Operations Director Erin Timmerman intended to celebrate three decades of local produce and prepared foods, hot lunches and good vibes in the heart of downtown, they said. But just maybe, Boldt said, the market’s runaway success — with 357,000 customers in 2018 — has played a role in Vancouver’s redevelopment in recent years. Now, that redevelopment is coming home to roost.

“When you are a market in the public right of way, you know there are going to be changes,” Boldt said. Some vendors are complaining, but Boldt believes there are more advantages than disadvantages to the new arrangement. In his experience, vendors who move from familiar spots to a new ones gain lots of new customers as they “reintroduce” themselves to everyone wandering by, he said.

“Flipping the market on its head” will generate some protest, but in the end it will invigorate the whole scene, Boldt believes. “Change is always a challenge at first, even if it turns out to be positive,” he said.

The market launched in 1990 at the foot of Broadway; it moved in 2000 to Esther Street on the west side of Esther Short Park, where the city supplied plentiful utility hookups and a convenient lack of curbs for pedestrians to trip over. Since then, the market map had been an inverted L shape that runs down Esther from Eighth Street and turned right (west) at the roundabout at Sixth. But now, Sixth has been called back into service for visitor and construction traffic, which will continue through the summer and, perhaps, well into the future.

The new layout abandons West Sixth for segments of West Eighth on either side of Esther, plus a slice of Esther to the north. What used to be an L will become a lowercase t. Boldt said he’s not sure how long the relocation will last; it might be permanent. “I don’t know if we’ll ever move back to Sixth,” he said.
The market isn’t losing any vendor booths to this change, but there will be some nuanced differences. Sixth Street was wide enough to host a middle row of vendors. But that’s not possible on Eighth, where there will be two rows of vendors, like on Esther Street.

Vendors at the west end of Sixth sometimes felt stuck at the “dead end” of the market where foot traffic dwindled, Boldt said, but there shouldn’t be any dead end in the new, centralized location. There’s even a climate advantage to the change, he added, since Eighth Street’s trees and buildings offer more shelter from the sun and wind.