Pike Place Market

Where it sits. The market runs along Pike Place, a short street that peels off First Avenue at Pike Street and drops northwest along the edge of a bluff above Elliott Bay in downtown Seattle. What looks from the street like one long arcade is in fact a stack: the Main Arcade steps down the hillside through several lower levels of small shops that most visitors never find, ending at a viaduct-level walkway above the waterfront. The neon sign reading "Public Market Center" with its clock has hung over the corner since 1937 and is the most recognisable object in the city after the Space Needle. Nine acres around it were designated a historical district, which is why the market has escaped the glass towers that now surround it on three sides.

Why it exists. It opened on 17 August 1907 after a public scandal about the price of onions, which had risen tenfold through a chain of middlemen. The city councillor Thomas Revelle proposed a public street where farmers could sell directly from their wagons, and on the first morning a handful of growers were mobbed by thousands of shoppers. Permanent arcades followed within a year. By the 1960s the district was decaying and an urban-renewal plan proposed demolishing it for offices and a hotel garage; the architect Victor Steinbrueck led a citizens' campaign that put the question on the ballot in November 1971 and won, creating the historic district and a public authority to run it. The market survives because voters overruled their own planners.

What actually happens here. Around eighty farmers hold day stalls, alongside roughly two hundred craftspeople and a permanent tenancy of butchers, fishmongers, cheesemakers, bakers, florists and small restaurants. Rules keep chains out and require that makers sell their own work. The Pike Place Fish Market at the corner of the Main Arcade has thrown fish between counter and cutting board since 1986, which began as a way of moving stock quickly and became a performance with a schedule. Rachel, a 250-kilogram bronze piggy bank cast by Georgia Gerber in 1986, stands beneath the clock and collects several thousand dollars a year for market social services. Down the stairs in Post Alley, the Gum Wall began in the early 1990s outside the Market Theater queue and has been steam-cleaned exactly once, in November 2015, when more than a tonne of gum came off the brick; it was fully recoated within two years.

On screen. Sleepless in Seattle (1993) used the market for one of its most quoted scenes: Sam Baldwin and his friend Jay sit in a window booth at the Athenian, a 1909 restaurant and bar inside the Main Arcade, discussing dating in the 1990s and tiramisu, with Elliott Bay behind the glass. The Athenian still marks the stool where Tom Hanks sat with a small plaque. Sam's houseboat in the same film is a genuine private home on Lake Union at the north end of Westlake Avenue, visible only from the water. The market's other regular screen role is as an establishing shot, which is why the neon sign appears in the opening seconds of a great many productions set in Seattle whether or not the film went anywhere near it.

Coffee, and a common error. The Starbucks at 1912 Pike Place is billed as the original and queued for accordingly. It is the oldest surviving store, opened in 1976, but not the first: the company began in 1971 at 2000 Western Avenue, a few hundred metres away, and moved when that building was redeveloped. The shop retains the older brown logo and grinds beans rather than running a full espresso menu. Ten metres away, several independent roasters sell better coffee to a much shorter line.

Getting there and timing. The market is a ten-minute walk from Westlake Center and the light rail, and downhill all the way from the retail core, though the return climb is steep. Most stalls open at 9am and the produce sellers start packing by mid-afternoon; the fishmongers and restaurants run later. Between May and September the farm tables are at their best, with Washington cherries in June and July, peaches in August and apples through the autumn. Winter mornings are wet, dark and far more atmospheric, and the crowds thin to almost nothing. The lower levels reward twenty minutes of aimless descending — magic shops, map dealers, a shop selling only buttons — and the Pike Place Hillclimb behind the Main Arcade drops to the waterfront, the aquarium and the ferry terminals in about four minutes.