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| photo:John
Whipple |
To
Market, to Market
By
Miriam Axel-Lute
The
Troy Winter Farmer’s Market turns a marginal mall space into
an old-world social center
Alan McClintock has not come to the farmer’s market on this
Saturday planning to make a morning of it. The Troy resident
just hasn’t had breakfast yet, and has ducked in to pick up
some sort of baked good from one of the 50-odd vendors lined
shoulder-to-shoulder around the tiled atrium at Third and
Broadway.
But the sounds of local flamenco guitarist Maria Zemantauski,
who is playing with her full band in one of the side hallways,
have drawn McClintock in. And as he stands by the music, one
by one, people he knows wander by, pausing to give him a hug
and say hi, until one who has stopped to chat teases, “Women
are just lining up to give you hugs!” (As if on cue, a male
friend stops by a minute later. “This is the nicest gathering
in the whole world nowadays!” he enthuses, completely unprompted,
before rushing off “to catch up with my wife.”)
McClintock, a carpenter with long white hair, grins and says
quietly that this is turning out pretty well: “I hadn’t had
a hug all week.” By some introverts’ standards, McClintock,
an active contra dancer and member of the Honest Weight Food
Co-op, is actually something of a social butterfly, but if
you follow most visitors to the market around for 10 minutes
or so, you will likely see them run into someone they know.
“What
are you doing here?” “Just hanging out listening to Maria.”
Little knots of people are gathered in every aisle. Some groups
are trading rutabaga recipes. Others are discussing the evening’s
plans or the latest gallery opening. South Troy resident Pam
Bentien has just passed off tickets to an event she couldn’t
attend to a friend whom she’d arrange to meet here. It was
a logical place to meet up, she notes. “This is the place
to be.”
A farmer’s market in the dead of winter in upstate New York
may not immediately seem like it would be the most happening
place. Most such markets close in October and don’t start
up again until May or June. But at Troy’s, though the profusion
of fresh vegetables has diminished to piles of roots and some
coveted and highly expensive greenhouse spinach, the offerings—apples,
eggs, cheese, meat, wine, jam, baked goods, anything wool—are
easily still diverse enough to attract a crowd. Musicians,
community groups, and prepared-food vendors round out the
nonprofit, producers-only market, which has been operating
since 2002 (the summer market started in 2000).
The market transforms the Uncle Sam Atrium Building, which
was built in 1979 as an indoor mall. A mall wasn’t what Troy
needed, it seems, and much of the retail space in the building
eventually was filled in with government offices. Much of
the time it’s a fairly desolate place. But from 10 AM to 2
PM on Saturdays in the winter, the common space of the atrium
blossoms.
There are regulars who do as much of their shopping as they
can here, reveling in the chance to get goods that are locally
and sustainably produced and to meet the people who make them.
But there are also those who are happy to grab a half-gallon
of cider one week or a wheel of cheese the next, but mostly
come for the socializing.
Augi Vaicus and Judy Meyer moved to Troy a few years ago from
Hudson. In Hudson, says Meyer, you might run into someone
for a few seconds on the street, but if you wanted to chat
more you had to make the “commitment” of settling into a restaurant.
Now they look forward to coming to the market nearly every
week to “get all the good rumors firsthand,” and hang out
with their friends.
In the summer they meet at picnic benches. In the winter they
follow a pattern started by Troy native Carl Erickson two
years ago of bringing chairs down from an upstairs café to
a wide landing on the center stairway that commands a broad
view of the general bustle. Erickson, who has spent time in
small-town Latin America, says this market functions for him
like the traditional markets there, becoming the social hub
of the week.
Other groups also have settled in for the long haul, one by
the children’s art table, several strung along the low wall
surrounding the dry pool under the stairs. Seating is at a
premium, so one group of college students enjoying a leisurely
lunch has turned inward, taking seats on the painted-blue
fountain bottom.
This morning the group on the landing has been trading thoughts
on the recent city property auction. Vaicus was happy to see
more contractors than absentee landlords present, but others
were worried about the fate of specific buildings next door
to their homes.
New friendships have been forged on this landing that have
little to do with the finer points of the difference between
grass-fed and grain-fed beef that are being earnestly discussed
below. The people at the market aren’t “segmented into work,
academic studies. . . . There’s folks from all walks of life,”
says Vaicus. He indicates another landing regular, Paul Grattan,
a Waterford resident who says he was born in 1909 and has
been coming to the market since it opened. “We never knew
this guy before we ran into him here.”
maxel-lute@metroland.net
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