An illustrated history of the buildings and spacesdevoted to the urban marketplace for fresh food. The public market is a worldwide urban phenomenon with atradition as old as cities themselves, continuing today in thegreenmarket movement. Surveyed here by type are open-airmarketplaces, street markets, street vendors, markets that occupythe ground floor of public buildings, open-sided sheds situated inthe middle of wide streets, and fully-enclosed market houses, aswell as central markets and wholesale markets, whose complex ofbuildings and streets encompass entire market districts. Specialfeatures include an essay on the nearly two-hundred-year history ofthe Fulton Fish Market in New York City and a section on the peopleand activities that make the public-market system work?fromthe farmers and fishermen who travel before dawn to the sanitationstaff who clean up at the end of the day. Public markets persist asan enduring and universal form of urban food marketing anddistribution, and a strong sense of tradition informs theirarchitecture, design, and engineering. 850 illustrations plusCD-ROM of all illustrations.