HOLLYWOOD — Six days a week the farmers’-market lot is asphalt and oil stains, a rectangle the neighborhood keeps its cars on without a second thought. On the seventh it becomes the most public ground for a mile — nearer to a town square than anything we have ever managed to build on purpose.
I have been going on Sunday mornings for longer than I will admit in print. I go for the stone fruit in July and the excuse in every other month. What keeps me is not the produce. It is that the lot, for five hours a week, does the work a plaza is supposed to do and almost never does: it puts people who would otherwise never meet into the same slow-moving line.
You cannot buy a peach there without standing behind someone unlike yourself. The line for the tamale cart holds a studio grip still in last night’s clothes, a retiree who has priced every stall and will tell you which is dear, a mother translating the board for her kids and the vendor at the same time. The parking lot flattens them into customers, which turns out to be a surprisingly civil thing to be to one another.
Things happen on that asphalt that happen nowhere else in the neighborhood anymore. Petitions get signed on card tables. A man plays a guitar for the open case at his feet and the toddlers who dance without embarrassment. The block’s arguments get aired — I have heard the bike lanes, the coyotes and the rent all debated over the same crate of tomatoes — and, more often than the internet would predict, aired without anyone raising a voice, because you can see the other person’s face and their kid and their grocery bag.
We keep trying to build the thing the lot already is. Every few years a plan arrives for a proper civic plaza somewhere along the Boulevard, with renderings full of clean-shirted people at little tables under new trees. The renderings never quite come true, and when some version of them does get built it tends to sit empty, because you cannot schedule a town square into being. It happens where people already have a reason to go. On Sunday, the reason is the peaches.
None of this is an argument against a real plaza; I would take one gladly. It is an argument for noticing what we already have, and for not paving its Sunday over in the name of something that photographs better. The market’s lease on that lot is not permanent. The land under it is worth a great deal to people who look at a rectangle of asphalt and think, correctly, that it could hold a building.
When the market turned thirty-five this spring, the coverage counted the vendors and the years. It did not count the thing I go for. So let me: last Sunday I watched two strangers, sent by the same sold-out produce stall toward the next one over, walk the length of the lot together arguing amiably about the right way to choose a melon. Neither of them bought one. Both left having talked to a neighbor, on the asphalt we would spend Monday parking on again.