On July 16, 1976, as America celebrated its bicentennial year, a dozen farmers gathered at a parking lot at East 59th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan to start a different sort of revolution. They lined up their trucks and unloaded wooden bushels of produce: tomatoes, radishes, carrots, rainbow chard. This was the city’s first Greenmarket, which urban planner Barry Benepe had conceived as a way to bring fresh food to New Yorkers while allowing regional farmers to sell directly to customers, eliminating middlemen and saving small farms.
This article was originally published on this website.
