Since 1857 the City Market has traded on this ground, already in business when the Civil War began and still selling produce to you through two World Wars, the Great Depression, urban renewal, and the rise of the suburban supermarket. Markets this old and this continuous are rare in American cities. In the 19th century, this was where farmers from the surrounding Missouri countryside brought produce, livestock, and goods to sell to the residents and merchants of Kansas City.
The river landing was a short distance away, and goods arriving by steamboat flowed through the market district. Today the City Market operates on weekends as an open-air farmers' market with more than 150 vendors selling produce, flowers, baked goods, and prepared foods. On weekdays, the surrounding permanent market houses a mix of Asian grocery stores, restaurants, and specialty food shops that reflect the waves of immigration that have shaped this neighborhood — Vietnamese, Cambodian, Somali, and Latino communities have all found a foothold in the River Market.
It is one of the most genuinely diverse commercial spaces in Kansas City, and one of the few places where the city's 19th-century commercial geography and its 21st-century multicultural identity occupy the same physical space.