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Philip Spiess
Mr. Lounds: A short answer (for me) to your inquiry, as an addendum to my initial answer (a fuller answer may follow when I can get to my files):
While still thinking through my recollections of Cincinnati markets (after I had put my first response to you on this Forum, and having imbibed a "Calvados Cocktail" for inspiration), the memories (such as they were) came flooding back. (However, I quickly squelched those memories of the Great Flood of 1937 on the Ohio River, which cancelled Walnut Hills High School mid-term exams for my mother, a sophomore at the time, and I went back to thinking about the Cincinnati markets.)
Point 1: I said there were five or six city markets; I believe there were nine in toto at one time (I was thinking just of permanent market-houses, but there were some farmers' markets that appeared with regularity on certain streets at certain times also).
Point 2: The downtown markets slowly closed as the automobile age inspired people to move to the hilltop suburbs from the downtown basin, and neighborhood business districts emerged and thrived, cutting into the old market economy of downtown. I think of my suburb of Clifton (my father and grandmother on the other side of the family had started out in the "Over-the-Rhine" district, thus shopping at Findlay Market), where, in Clifton in the 1950s, there were two grocery stores -- later supermarkets -- two butcher shops, two drugstores, two "Five-and-Dimes", and so on, in a three-block section of Ludlow Avenue.
Point 3: One market was closed down ostensibly for "reasons of public health." This was the notorious wooden Fifth Street (Meat) Market (built 1829), an abattoir of the first order. But the real reason the city destroyed it (1870) was to build Fountain Square and the Tyler Davidson Fountain (see the second last paragraph of my notes at Post #3001).
Point 4: Once refrigeration as a matter of daily life arrived in the average home, first through "ice-boxes" (I remember an ice-house on Jefferson Avenue half way between Burnet Woods and Schiel School, right where Clifton became Corryville) and then through refrigerators, most people stopped shopping on a daily basis at local markets, usually buying their food about once a week (per family budget).
Point 5: Your inquiry initially confused me, because my memory said that the "Sixth Street Market" was the "Jabez Elliot Flower Market" (built in 1890 on Sixth Street between Elm and Plum Streets), unique among the Cincinnati markets because it sold only flowers, whereas you had mentioned that you remembered chickens and slabs of meat (including the smells!) and such being sold there. But then I remembered that there was another Sixth Street Market-House (a.k.a. "Western Market," built in 1895 on Sixth Street between Plum Street and Western Row, in an incredible Flemish style by the best Cincinnati architectural firm of the era, Samuel Hannaford & Sons). My notes tell me that it was unheated (so probably also unrefrigerated? -- the earlier markets kept their produce cold in the basements of nearby local breweries) and had 64 indoor stalls (i presume that, like Findlay Market, it also had some outside stalls -- hence the "barkers"). It was razed in 1960 to make way for the Sixth Street ramp onto the Mill Creek Expressway (I-75).
[P.S.: Yes, I did find some available notes that helped me fill out my "memories" here, but if I get to my files anytime soon, I'll do a complete run-down of all of Cincinnati's markets (most of which were run-down).]
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