Transforming Lexington Market: Baltimore City’s Public Market

How can a transformed Lexington Market represent the incredible diversity of Baltimore City through its vendors and visitors?

Lexington Market, located in the heart of Baltimore City’s downtown, is a culinary and cultural icon with more than 200 years of history. Identified as the longest continuously operating public market in the country, it has provided a home for thousands of small businesses, access to fresh and prepared foods, and hosted gatherings of all types since it started as an open air cart market in 1782. Now owned by the City of Baltimore, the market was in need of a major update and reimagining, and in 2018, Seawall was selected as the developer to lead the market’s transformation.

We knew that the process to even begin work on a new Lexington Market building began long before we came onto the scene. This is a project rooted in community listening and historical precedent that goes all the way back to the start of the Market. Lexington has always been a microcosm both of Baltimore’s successes and failures, and the modern day is no exception. That’s why we started our process by spending two years listening to all types of Market customers, merchants, city officials, and community members – ultimately determining that the best path forward was to build a new 53,000-square-foot Market building on an adjacent parking lot, while reopening historic Lexington Street as a pedestrian plaza with outdoor seating, event space, and public art. We modeled the new building off of an early 1900s market shed structure to harken back to its past while modernizing infrastructure and making way for new types of programming and vendors.

The merchants have always been the heart and soul of Lexington Market, and we engaged in a process to establish new merchants principles and a diverse, equitable application and selection process. We had heard clearly in the community that the merchant mix at the market needed to better reflect the diversity of Baltimore, so we made it a priority to increase the amount of Black, women, and city resident-owned businesses in the new market. After an application call that resulted in more than 400 applicants and a selection process that relied on a collaborative review committee of community members and small business experts. The resulting vendor mix in the new market is a mix of legacy and new-to-Lexington merchants and increases the percentage of Black-owned businesses from 5% to 50%, with more than half of the businesses identifying as women-owned.

The $45 million redevelopment plan came together around a central question – “how could the entire city of Baltimore fall in love again with Lexington Market?” The new market building held its grand opening in January 2023, and it is already proving to be a worthy home for this storied community gathering place.