Why you should experience The Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles, California.
The Original Farmers Market is a storied marketplace where Fairfax's commercial character meets Depression-era entrepreneurship, multigenerational food culture and the enduring legacy of Los Angeles's transformation from agricultural outskirts into a metropolitan center.
Set along West 3rd Street near Fairfax Avenue and just steps from The Grove, the marketplace occupies the western edge of the Central Los Angeles Basin between Beverly Grove and the Wilshire corridor, where the dense street grid extends north toward West Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills and east toward Hancock Park beneath the distant ridgeline of the Santa Monica Mountains. Low market buildings and covered passages maintain a markedly horizontal profile against the larger commercial blocks surrounding the intersection. Narrow internal aisles compress the property into a succession of counters, stalls and small courts, with green awnings and freestanding signs preserving the visual scale of a marketplace assembled incrementally across decades. The clock tower rises above that low roofline as an orientation point visible across the interior passages, giving an otherwise irregular collection of structures a recognizable vertical center. The result is a tightly grained urban marketplace whose low-slung architecture, intimate circulation, prominent tower and position at the meeting point of Fairfax and Third preserve a physical scale increasingly distinct within Central Los Angeles.
What you should know about The Original Farmers Market.
The Original Farmers Market is best known for turning a vacant portion of the Gilmore family property into a permanent marketplace after Fred Beck and Roger Dahlhjelm proposed that local farmers sell produce directly from their trucks during the Great Depression. The property's history had begun far earlier, when Arthur Fremont Gilmore and a partner purchased two dairy farms in 1880 and divided their holdings a decade later, leaving Gilmore with a 256-acre ranch at what remained the rural western edge of Los Angeles. Drilling undertaken to find water around the turn of the twentieth century struck oil, replacing dairy cattle with derricks and creating the foundation for the Gilmore Oil enterprise. Large-scale drilling ceased as Los Angeles expanded around the property during the 1920s, leaving substantial acreage available for new uses under Arthur's son, Earl Bell Gilmore. Beck and Dahlhjelm approached E.B. Gilmore during the Depression with their proposal for a farmers' village at Third and Fairfax, and he permitted the experiment on the vacant ground. Twelve farmers and six other merchants arrived on July 14, 1934, paying 50 cents per day for chalked spaces where produce was sold from truck beds. Demand altered the enterprise within months as restaurants, grocers and service businesses moved into permanent stalls, and the first Fall Festival followed in October. Blanche Magee, who already operated with her husband at Downtown's Grand Central Market, began serving sandwiches to farmers and customers before developing a restaurant and nut business on the property. The arrival of prepared food required tables, chairs and supporting infrastructure, helping shift the enterprise beyond direct agricultural sales into a permanent place for eating and shopping. By 1948 a clock tower had joined the growing complex, carrying the phrase “An Idea” in recognition of Beck, Dahlhjelm and the original merchants whose inexpensive Depression-era experiment had survived into a permanent Los Angeles institution.
The wider Gilmore property developed simultaneously into an extraordinary concentration of entertainment and automobile culture that surrounded the market with uses almost entirely erased from the contemporary streetscape. E.B. Gilmore opened Gilmore Stadium in 1934 as an 18,000-seat venue associated most strongly with midget-car racing, though professional football, boxing, rodeos and other events also filled its calendar. The Los Angeles Bulldogs made the stadium their home, and a 1936 game between the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers drew 19,300 spectators into a building designed for fewer people. Gilmore expanded the sporting complex in 1939 by spending $200,000 on Gilmore Field for the Pacific Coast League's Hollywood Stars, whose opening game against the Seattle Rainiers drew an overflow crowd of 12,500. Hollywood figures including Cecil B. DeMille and Barbara Stanwyck belonged to the Stars' ownership group, strengthening the connection between the baseball club and the nearby film industry. Another layer arrived in 1948 when the Gilmore Drive-In opened along 3rd Street with an Art Deco screen tower and benches that admitted patrons. The family's oil business reinforced the same automotive world through Blu-Green gasoline, the Red Lion trademark and Gas-a-teria stations that promoted discounted self-service fueling across the West Coast. Mobil acquired the Gilmore Oil Company in 1943, but the family retained the real-estate holdings around Third and Fairfax as the sporting properties disappeared during the postwar decades. Gilmore Stadium closed after its final race in 1950, and Gilmore Field disappeared in 1958 after the Brooklyn Dodgers' arrival ended Pacific Coast League baseball in Los Angeles. The market survived those vanished stadiums, oil operations and entertainment properties as the enduring commercial remnant of a much larger Gilmore domain that had passed through agriculture, petroleum, motor sport, professional baseball and roadside entertainment.
How to fold The Original Farmers Market into your trip.
The Original Farmers Market works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting the birth of purpose-built television production, a pioneering Streamline Moderne exhibition hall and the westward movement of Los Angeles's oldest Jewish congregation.
Begin at Television City, where CBS purchased 25 acres at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in 1950 as network television entered a period of rapid national expansion. William Pereira and Charles Luckman developed the complex with Gin Wong, James Langenheim and Charles Stanton, creating one of the earliest large facilities conceived expressly for television broadcasting and production. Completed in 1952, its International Style architecture enclosed soundstages, rehearsal halls, editing rooms, offices, shops and storage within a production system built for the emerging medium. Four original studios formed the operational core, and Studio 43 received RCA color cameras in 1954 as CBS experimented with color broadcasting during television's formative decade. Continue to Pan Pacific Park, occupying ground associated with the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, the exhibition hall commissioned by brothers Clifford and Phillip Henderson for the 1935 National Housing Exposition. Plummer, Wurdeman and Becket designed a vast wooden hall behind a 228-foot Streamline Moderne facade distinguished by four upswept towers resembling aircraft fins. Construction proceeded in only 56 days before the auditorium opened on May 18, 1935, and the building subsequently hosted the Ice Capades, basketball, hockey, automobile exhibitions, political gatherings and major public events for more than three decades. Its architectural success propelled the young firm toward a far larger Los Angeles practice before the auditorium closed in 1972 and burned in 1989. Conclude at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where Congregation B'nai B'rith moved west from Downtown under Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin and dedicated its new sanctuary in 1929. A. M. Edelman, Allison & Allison and S. Tilden Norton developed the building around a Byzantine dome spanning 100 feet, with Hugo Ballin creating murals commissioned by the Warner brothers to depict Jewish history. Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Carl Laemmle, Sol Lesser and Sid Grauman financed additional elements, embedding Hollywood's early studio generation within the building's creation. The progression moves from television's emergence as a purpose-built Los Angeles industry through the Streamline Moderne architecture of mass entertainment and culminates in a congregation whose 1929 sanctuary joined religious life with the creative figures shaping Hollywood.
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