Tour brings history of shops to the surface
Visitors get to take a look at tunnels, vaults below Lexington Market
On and off for more than a century and a half, the tunnels and vaults beneath Lexington Market may have been an ideal place for people to do things they didn’t want other people to know about:
Distilling bootleg whiskey. Lewd dancing. Communist plotting. A snowball fight in July.
All these possibilities were mentioned by Richard Messick, a volunteer with the local history organization Baltimore Heritage. He led a tour Saturday of the caverns beneath the 237-year-old food hall, the nation’s oldest continually operating public market.
“The vaults and tunnels were installed after the Civil War,” Messick told about two dozen history buffs. “We think they originally were used as refrigeration to keep produce and meats fresh. But we still don’t have all the answers.”
Vault tours are conducted the second Saturday of most months except for June, July and August. Baltimore Heritage members are charged $10; everyone else pays $15.
Maryrejahlil Lanier, 26, of Baltimore grew up nearby and as a child often shopped for groceries at Lexington Market. Now a graduate student at the University of Maryland, she didn’t know until recently that the tunnels exist.
“As a student of cultural anthropology, this is my jam,” Lanier said. “What happened in the past determines how Lexington Market and the city will be utilized in the future.”
Founded in 1782 at what then was the far western edge of the city, Lexington Market was, in Messick’s words, “Baltimore’s first suburban shopping mall.”
Vendors in blue Conestoga wagons pulled by teams of up to eight horses sold ham, butter, turkeys and eggs from the 2 a.m. opening bell until noon. That description is charming — but what’s unclear, Messick said, is whether enslaved people were sold alongside the animals and produce.
“I haven’t found a specific mention of it in my research,” he said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised. The slave trade was unfortunately booming back then.”
During Prohibition the underground vaults were raided at least once on suspicion that bootleg whiskey was manufactured in the cave-like chambers. In addition, law enforcement officials from that era suspected that the vaults were being used by Communist sympathizers.
In 1930, U.S. Rep. Hamilton Fish Sr. led a contingent of officers from the U.S. Capitol Police into the vaults, according to news accounts. Fish was searching for a trunk that he believed carried papers pertaining to local Communist activity.
But despite two back-to back-raids on subsequent days, investigators came away empty-handed. A Nov. 19, 1930, Baltimore Sun article had a lot of fun at the New York congressman’s expense.
The headline read, “Fish attends Fruitless Raid on Warehouse.” The article characterized the expedition as “a raid that was not a raid — officially, at least” and described “several crates of lettuce were put on the sidewalk [and] appeared to have been thoroughly searched.”
But after that spurt of bureaucratic scrutiny, the vaults apparently fell out of use. For nearly two decades everyone seems to have forgotten about them, including the market’s merchants.
Messick said the caverns were unearthed in 1951 during the construction of a parking garage. That discovery and the publicity that followed triggered anecdotes from some of the basement’s former visitors. Pieces of the historic puzzle began falling into place.
“An adult child of one of the vendors remembered having snowball fights in the vaults in the 1920s in July,” Messick said. “Kids would pull off handfuls of snow and ice from the refrigeration condensation units.”