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Philip Spiess
I've just been reading a book, sent to me as a birthday present by a friend who knows how much I esteem the succulent and crustaceous bivalve, on the history of New York City as told in terms of how oysters figured in, and helped determine, that city's history (Mark Kurlansky: The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, 2006).
I remark on this here for two reasons: Reason 1: A description of the largest New York City market in the 19th Century, the Washington Market, reminded me of our own Cincinnati Findlay Market (founded, if I recall, in 1853); I give a portion of it here: ". . . the best beef in prodigious quarters; and avenues with . . . prairie game from floor to ceiling; farther on a vegetable bower, and next to that a yellow barricade of country butter and cheese. You cannot see an idle trader. The poulterer fills in his spare moments in plucking his birds, and saluting the buyers; and while the butcher is cracking a joint for one purchaser he is loudly canvassing another from his small stand, which is completely walled in with meats. All the while there is a din of clashing sounds. . . ."
When I was a young lad, and even into my WHHS years, I used to accompany my great-grandmother and grandmother (and sometimes my mother) down to Findlay Market on market days, which were Wednesdays and Saturdays as I recall (I suppose I did this in the summer), and we would shop in the markethouse and the outlying greengrocer stands. I well remember a number of the permanent stands in the markethouse: Spies's Cheese (no relative, as near as we could determine, but I got free handouts anyway); Kunkel's Pickles, Olives, Sauerkraut, etc.; the "Cookie Man" (don't know his name), who would give my sister and me free broken cookies; and the butcher who specialized in sausage (i.e., wurst), and who, in the late 1990s, amused my then-young son by dancing pickled pigs' feet up and down the counter and cavorting with two sow's ears. At the east end of the markethouse were citrus stands, flower stands, and the ground horseradish vendors; at the west end were country-fresh vegetable and egg stands. In the center were the entryways that divided east and west halves of the markethouse, with an open belfry in a cupola above and the bell-rope hanging down within reach (why I never thought to ring it as a boy, I don't know). And the vendors constantly called out their wares to passers by, just as in the New York description above.
Of course there were other Cincinnati markets: we also occasionally shopped at the Court Street Market (on the street west of the front of the Hamilton County Courthouse), but which seemed much more sparse to me, although there was Avril's Meat Market and Butcher's along the southern stretch of Court Street (turned out Ferd Avril was a fraternity brother of mine from Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity at Hanover College in Indiana). There was also the venerable Jabez Elliott Flower Market (I'm guessing here on the actual address) on Sixth Street west of Plum -- but it disappeared in my middle years. The site of Fountain Square had been the notorious Fifth Street Market -- an abattoir of a butchers' meat market running red with blood and guts and the stench thereof -- but how it was transformed overnight into Fountain Square is another story (but cf. the cast iron flower stand that remains on the Square for important legal reasons)!
Findlay Market was "restored" (i.e., "gussied up") back in the late 1970s or 1980s, and this was a Good Thing, because it kept it in existence and operating, but the Market itself lost the fusty and funky charm that I remember from the 1950s/1960s. "And the beat goes on. . . ."
Reason 2: My memories of Cincinnati's Central Oyster House on the north side of East Fifth Street, just east of Government Square (I may have mentioned this before in these pages in the past two years, so stop me if you've heard this one). It was a venerable establishment run by several generations of the Spicer family, and located in a very narrow storefront building, but one which went back at least half a block, with sawdust on the floor and stamped-tin panels on the ceiling (reminiscent of Jakob Wirth's Bierstube in Boston, if you know that establishment) -- with elderly gentleman cooks constantly stirring oyster stew in pots in the front window, cream broth in one, milk broth in the other, and solemn waiters in long white aprons serving up bread, butter, creamy coleslaw, and, of course, oysters in a variety of forms, and patrons and servers both watching with eager anticipation the descent and ascent of the hand-operated dumb-waiter in the back room that delivered the goods when ready. It was where I learned, in the words of Jonathan Swift, to "first eat an oyster." Their fried oysters, in a light crumb batter I've never experienced elsewhere, were heaven. But alas! urban renewal came a-knocking in the mid-1960s, and that entire block was slated for demolition. The Central Oyster House moved to a new location below Fourth Street and across Main Street from the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co.; it was decorated in a 1960s pseudo-New England clam shack or faux Maryland crab house style, and the food just wasn't the same quality; it closed permanently after several years. "O tempore, o mores!"
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Hope to see you at the reunion!
