For 134 years, the most important building on Pennsylvania Avenue was not a hotel, a newspaper office, or a federal office. It was a market. From 1797 until New Year’s Day 1931, the two-acre block bounded by Pennsylvania, 7th, B (now Constitution), and 9th was where Washington bought its dinner. The last and grandest version of the building, Adolph Cluss’s 1872 Center Market, had 666 stalls under one roof, electric lights, hydraulic elevators, and six artesian wells. It was the largest market hall in the country when it opened. Today its footprint is the National Archives.
This is the story of how Washington got its market, who built it, why it was wonderful, and why the federal government tore it down to make room for paper.
The marsh market on the canal
In 1797, President George Washington designated two acres in the new federal city as a public marketplace. On October 6, 1802, Mayor Robert Brent and the City Council formally established Center Market south of Pennsylvania Avenue between 7th and 9th Streets. Section 5 of the ordinance warned that “no person shall sell or expose for sale in said market any unsound, blown, or unwholesome meat or articles of provision, under the penalty of five dollars for every offence.”
The block sat next to the Washington City Canal, which ran along what is now Constitution Avenue. The land was swampy and the nickname came naturally: Marsh Market. Early Washingtonians remembered hunting wild ducks in the wetlands and buying live fish directly out of the canal. Thomas Jefferson is said to have walked over from the President’s House to shop.
For its first sixty years the market was less a building than a cluster of frame sheds and outdoor stalls. Slaves were sold there, alongside vegetables and meat, until the District’s compensated emancipation in April 1862. After 1862 the market also became a place where Black vendors owned stalls and ran businesses on the same block where, weeks earlier, people had been auctioned.
By 1850 the market was a hodgepodge of wooden sheds in one of the most prestigious locations in the country: a few blocks from the Capitol on one side, a few blocks from the White House on the other. By 1870 there were 700 vendors working out of it. Congress and the public agreed it was a health and safety hazard. Washington needed a real building.
The architect: Adolph Cluss, the Red Architect
The man Washington hired for the job is one of the strangest figures in American architecture. Adolph Cluss was born July 14, 1825, in Heilbronn in the Kingdom of Württemberg. He arrived in the United States in 1848 at age 23, and he did not arrive alone in spirit. Cluss was a member of the Communist League and a close personal friend of Karl Marx. The two corresponded throughout the early 1850s. Friedrich Engels called Cluss “an invaluable agent.” Marx called him “one of our best and most talented men.”
In Washington, Cluss kept up that life for a few years. He helped found a gymnastics club for German immigrant workers. He wrote essays for the New York German-language papers Die Revolution and Die Reform. Then, slowly, he drifted out of revolutionary politics and into engineering. By the late 1850s he was working as a draftsman at the Navy Yard. He started his own architecture practice in 1862. By the time he retired in 1889 he had designed close to 90 buildings in Washington.
Most of them you have seen even if you do not know his name. Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, opened 1873. The Sumner School at 17th and M, opened 1872. The Franklin School at 13th and K, opened 1869 and good enough to win a Medal of Progress at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair. The Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building on the Mall, opened 1881. Calvary Baptist Church. The Charles Sumner schools. At least eleven schools in total, plus markets, government buildings, museums, residences, and churches.
His favorite material was red brick. That, plus the Marx friendship that everyone in the District eventually figured out, earned him the nickname the Red Architect. By the end of his life he was a confirmed Republican. He served as a City Engineer and Building Inspector for the D.C. Board of Public Works during the years Alexander Shepherd was paving the city. Cluss died July 24, 1905. The Red Architect outlived almost everything he built. Many of the schools and the markets came down in the twentieth century. The Center Market would too.
The 1864 false start and the 1870 charter
Cluss actually designed Center Market twice. The first time, in 1863, Mayor Richard Wallach asked him and partner Joseph Wildrich von Kammerhueber to draw up a brick market on the same B Street site. They got the walls up. In June 1864 the House of Representatives District Committee voted unanimously to stop the project on the grounds that Congress had never authorized the building. The whole House agreed. The walls were torn down. Cluss had already shown what a modern market hall could look like in Washington, and the city wanted one. It just had to wait.
The second time was a private deal. On May 20, 1870, Congress incorporated the Washington Market Company by Act of Congress, 41st Congress, Session I, Chapter 108. The first president was former Governor of the District of Columbia Henry D. Cooke. Former Mayor Matthew G. Emery succeeded him. The board included Alexander Shepherd, lobbyist Hallett Kilbourn, and Cluss’s old client John R. Elvans. The Market Company hired Cluss again. This time the project did not need congressional sign-off on the building itself, only on the company that owned it.
In 1871 Cluss took a trip to study the newest American market halls in person. He came back and laid out a complex of three market wings around an open courtyard, with a separate main building to follow.
Opening day, July 1, 1872
The three wings opened for business on Monday, July 1, 1872. We know this because the butchers said so. On opening day, the Evening Star ran column after column of stall notices on page 2. B. F. Hunt informed his customers that he could be found “TO-DAY, July 1st, at Stalls 566, 467 and 568 in the New Center Market on the 7th street wing, fronting B street, with his usual best quality of Beef. For this special occasion he has procured a lot of superior Southdown Lambs.” Geo. M. Oyster Jr. announced he would occupy Stalls 175, 176, and 177 in the B street wing near 7th, plus 490, 491, and 492 in the B street wing near 9th. E. I. Saulet was selling Philadelphia print butter twice a week out of Stall 343 “in the new Center Market, opposite 9th street entrance.”
A few days later the Star’s Weekly edition led its summary of the week with “the opening of the new market,” right alongside the opening of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad. That is how big a deal this building was in 1872 Washington.
The building, in numbers
The plaque the Market Company posted in front of the building eventually listed every dimension and every facility. The 7th Street wing was 200 feet by 78 feet. The 9th Street wing was 200 feet by 78 feet. The long B Street wing connecting them, parallel to the canal, was 344 feet by 84 feet. There were 666 numbered stalls inside, plus 34 iron booths under awnings, 100 farmer’s tables along the side walls, and 200 wagon spaces on the curbs. At full occupancy the market could hold a thousand sellers. Total floor space at completion: 57,500 square feet. That made it the largest market hall in the United States.
All three wings were two stories. The 7th Street and 9th Street wings were flanked by twin towers and entered under metal awnings. A canopy ran the entire length of B Street and 9th Street so the outdoor stalls had cover too. For a small fee, hucksters and farmers could pull up under the canopy and sell.
Inside, the place was thoroughly modern by 1870s standards. There were eight hydraulic elevators to move goods between the floors and the cold storage. There were six artesian wells yielding pure cold water for refrigeration. There were ventilated skylights. By 1888 there was a refrigeration plant with 400,000 cubic feet of cold rooms cooled by roughly ten miles of two-inch brine pipes, and there was electric light. A very tall chimney rose above the boiler room.
Cluss made one architectural decision that surprised people at the time. He laid out the complex without interior alleys or driveways. The reasoning, in his own words, was that “such passages were dangerous for market customers.” He wanted shoppers to stroll the wings without traffic. He wrote that the big ice houses in the courtyard were “indispensable appendages of a modern market in a southern climate.”
The 9th Street wing and the rise of refrigeration
The main building, which the company had originally floated as a hotel, was finished in 1878 as a row of twelve wholesale stores with a bank. In 1886 Cluss and his partner Paul Schulze designed the major expansion on 9th Street, a $75,000 project that nearly doubled the operating capacity. The 9th Street wing came with mechanical refrigeration. That mattered. Washington summers were brutal. Before refrigeration, a meat stall in July was a race against rot. Cold rooms changed everything, and Center Market was one of the first food markets in the country to have them at this scale.
The cold storage also let the market work as a kind of public deep-freeze. There was a fur room where Washingtonians stored furs, carpets, rugs, and other garments through the summer to protect them from moths. There were rooms where families could pay to leave hams. Houses did not have refrigerators yet. The market did.
Daily life in the market
Three D.C. streetcar lines converged on the market: the Washington and Georgetown, the Metropolitan, and the Anacostia and Potomac River. By the 1900s, automobiles parked at the curb alongside horse-drawn wagons. The market drew middle-class ladies, community leaders, businessmen, social reformers, hucksters, farmers from Maryland and Virginia, and street kids hawking gum and papers. A 1915 Lewis Hine photograph caught Gus Strateges, an eleven-year-old celery vendor from 212 Jackson Hall Alley, working past 10:30 P.M. and back out Sunday morning. He had been in the country a year and a half.
Inside the building, every stall was tiled with white subway tile for cleanliness. There were meat stalls, fish stalls, vegetable stalls, condiment stalls, flower stalls, dried fruit stalls, bakers’ stalls. A Louis P. Gatti fruit and vegetable stand. An Armour and Company sign on the front of the building advertised the Chicago meatpacker’s presence on the floor. There was a café. There was, eventually, a Ladies’ Waiting Room with an elevator down to it.
Outside, the curb stalls and the wagon spaces were their own ecosystem. Farmers drove in from the suburbs before dawn. Street vendors sold seasonal greens. From 1880 to 1931 the bronze statue of Major General John A. Rawlins stood in the triangular lot where Pennsylvania and Louisiana Avenues met at the market’s northeast corner. (Rawlins is now in Rawlins Park on E Street.) Behind the building, between Pennsylvania and Louisiana, a small park with trees softened the brick.
Why they tore it down
Two things killed Center Market. One was commercial. By the 1920s, chain grocery stores and modern supermarkets were spreading across American cities. Sanitary, Piggly Wiggly, and A&P branches were opening on Washington corners. The 666-stall model was still loved by old customers, but it was less central to how the city ate.
The bigger reason was the McMillan Plan. In 1901 the Senate Park Commission, chaired by Senator James McMillan, published a redesign of the monumental core of Washington. The plan called for a unified white-marble city of neoclassical museums and federal office buildings on the Mall and along Pennsylvania Avenue. Red-brick Victorian buildings, no matter how loved, did not fit the vision. The Old Post Office Pavilion almost came down for the same reason and only survived because of the Depression and World War II.
By the late 1920s the federal government was buying up the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue between 6th and 15th for what would become Federal Triangle. Center Market sat in the way. In 1921 the building had even been returned to public ownership, managed by the Department of Agriculture, but that was a holding action. The decision had effectively been made.
Center Market closed for the last time on January 1, 1931. Many of the vendors moved a few blocks north to the old Northern Liberty Market at 5th and K, which inherited the “Center Market” name. The Cluss building was taken apart over the next several months. The wing nearest 10th Street came down first.
On May 17, 1931, the Sunday Star printed a eulogy:
The great focus of interest, the one-time social center, place of endless entertainment, is gone and can never be restored. Another generation will have no concept of the significance of the site on which they stand.
What replaced it
President Herbert Hoover laid the cornerstone of the National Archives Building on February 20, 1933, on the block that had been the Center Market. The Archives, designed by John Russell Pope in a Greek temple form, opened to the public in 1935. Pope’s building turned its long colonnaded back to the Mall and faced Pennsylvania Avenue with a much grander entry: the Constitution Avenue facade is the everyday face of the building, the Pennsylvania Avenue side the formal one.
The Charters of Freedom (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights) moved into the rotunda in 1952. Where 666 stalls had sold dressed beef and Florida strawberries, the founding documents of the country now sit under sealed display cases.
The neighborhood Cluss’s market anchored is unrecognizable. Louisiana Avenue is gone west of 7th, plowed under for the Department of Justice. The Rawlins statue is two blocks west in its own little park. The Metro station closest to the site is called Archives–Navy Memorial–Penn Quarter, which is about as far from “Center Market” as a name can get.
Why this one is worth remembering
The thing to understand about Center Market is that it was not just a building. It was the place a city of 130,000 people in 1873, growing to half a million by 1931, fed itself. It was where the cook for a senator’s household and a domestic worker buying a chicken on her one afternoon off ran into each other at adjacent stalls. It was where farmers from Prince George’s and Loudoun met Italian and German immigrant butchers and a Greek kid hawking celery at midnight. It was a workplace and a social hall and a refrigerator and a public square.
The federal city replaced it with the building that holds the country’s memory. That trade has a logic. But the city also lost something specific in 1931: the everyday, working, smelly, useful, ungovernably alive piece of Washington that was not about national symbolism. The Southern Railway Building went the same year for the same reason. So did most of the block. Federal Triangle is the answer Washington gave to the question of what to do with the working city. Center Market was the question.
Cluss is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery. The red brick city he built is mostly gone. Eastern Market is still there. The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building is still there. The Sumner School is still there. The biggest one, his largest market hall, the one a teenage celery vendor and an emperor of beef did business in, is the National Archives.
Frequently asked questions
When was Center Market built?
The three market wings opened for business on July 1, 1872. The main building was finished in 1878 and the 9th Street wing was added in 1886 with mechanical refrigeration coming online by 1888. A market had operated on the same block since 1802 and the site was set aside for that purpose by George Washington in 1797.
Who designed Center Market?
Adolph Cluss (1825 to 1905), a German immigrant who had been a personal friend of Karl Marx before becoming Washington’s most prolific late-nineteenth-century architect. He also designed Eastern Market, the Franklin School, the Sumner School, and the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building.
When was Center Market demolished?
Center Market closed on January 1, 1931, after 134 years of marketing on the site. The Cluss building was taken down over the following several months, with the wing nearest 10th Street coming down first.
What replaced Center Market?
The National Archives Building, designed by John Russell Pope. Hoover laid the cornerstone on February 20, 1933, and the building opened in 1935. It was the first piece of the Federal Triangle complex to occupy ground that had been used for Center Market.
Where was Center Market located?
It occupied the entire block bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue NW on the north, 7th Street NW on the east, B Street (now Constitution Avenue) on the south, and 9th Street NW on the west. The address today is the National Archives Building at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.