Once filled with specialty food stores and niche grocers, the ByWard Market has shifted away from its roots as a traditional food market, area business owners say, and some aren’t sure the trend can be reversed.
The owner of Saslove’s Meat Market, a family-owned butcher shop that has been operating in the Market since 1954, says the ByWard Market is facing the “end of an era.” This month, John Diener, who took over ownership of the business from his parents in the 1980s, announced that the store would be closing after 70 years.
Diener has seen the Market go through decades of change, but he says the pandemic was “the last straw” for Saslove’s and that downtown revitalization plans are “too late.”
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“In this market 50 years ago, it was almost all food retail stores for blocks. There were 11 or 12 butcher shops here in the 1960s, there were multiple fruit and vegetable stores, a couple of fish stores, and now we’re hanging on with one of each,” he explained.
In the early 1900s, the Market featured taverns, hotels and industrial buildings and the rural farming communities of the surrounding region relied on it for distribution of agricultural goods. As a result, many specialty food retailers called the Market home, and some still do.
One of the neighbourhood’s most historic buildings, 64 George St., housed J. Saso and Son Italian grocery store, which opened in 1923. Last year, current store owner Pat Nicastro celebrated 100 years of serving Italian groceries in the market, under the name La Bottega Nicastro.
When La Bottega took over J. Saso and Son in 1995, Nicastro said the Market was “very different” than today.
“You could find a lot of small retail stores where you could get everything, do all your shopping, from fruits and vegetables, meat, bakeries …” he explained. “There’s still quite a few, but it’s different.
“When I opened, there was the Budapest Deli and House of Cheese, which are closed. There were all kinds of bakeries out there, and they’ve closed,” Nicastro continued. “So many fruit and vegetable stands have closed. There was Aubrey’s Meats. All gone.”
La Bottega has been faring well in the new circumstances, Nicastro emphasized, largely because the business has been able to “diversify” its services as consumer needs change. For example, in addition to specialty Italian goods, La Bottega now offers alcohol retail to complement its popular take-home meals. As a result, Nicastro said La Bottega is well-positioned.
But that hasn’t been the case for all of the businesses in the Market.
The ByWard Market District Authority (BMDA) points to changes in retail spending habits, particularly a growing concern among consumers over food prices, Victoria Williston, manager of communications, told OBJ.
Williston cited a report from Statistics Canada that found that 87 per cent of respondents were concerned about food prices, 70 per cent of whom considered fresh meat their biggest concern.
In efforts to support small businesses and local vendors, the BMDA has introduced retail concepts like STACKTx — a pop-up shop model housed in shipping containers — and the immigrant entrepreneurial pop-up shop. It also operates the ByWard Public Market, which recently implemented a policy allowing farmers to set up and sell free of charge.
Diener said rising costs and a change in consumer habits were largely responsible for his decision to close Saslove’s.
“COVID was the last straw. Everybody was working from home, so we lost that after-work traffic. They used to come to the Market and pick up food before going home,” he said. “And even though they’re back two or three days a week now, over the course of the pandemic, people’s habits changed, so we haven’t gotten that business back, specifically in the meat industry.
“Meat, especially beef, is very expensive now, so people don’t buy the way they used to. The days of people coming in and picking up 20 or more steaks for a barbecue at their cottage on the weekend … those days are gone,” Diener continued. “Somebody will buy a steak once in a while. It’s a treat. So, all these factors combined just made it difficult to continue, let alone the increase in expenses.”
The ByWard Fruit Market has been serving fresh produce to customers for more than 20 years. Owner Isaac Farbiasz’s view of the Market’s current predicament isn’t optimistic.
“It’s quite simple; Byward is only a market in name and history,” he wrote in an email to OBJ. “Sad but true.”
For Nicastro, the problem is twofold: a continued lack of foot traffic in the Market, and not enough support from municipal authorities for food retailers.
“The customer base has changed a little bit. There’s less people working down in the area. So we’ve lost a bit of that. But to get people down, the city has to give us support, knowing that retail is a special business,” he explained. “That’s an important factor to want to keep retailers, especially food retailers.
“We do need support from the city and the other stakeholders in the Market. To keep retail alive, they’ve got to make it more convenient for customers,” Nicastro continued. “You know, it’s not just an entertainment zone. It’s also a retail zone, and I think they forget that.”
Chris Penton, president of Beechwood Market, operates under the umbrella brand Ottawa Street Markets, which he said aims to bring the market experience to Ottawa’s neighbourhoods.
“ByWard had been a shadow of its former self for some time,” Penton wrote in an email to OBJ. “A sad development, as it was once the food and entertainment beacon of Ottawa.
“Our three markets — Beechwood Market, Alta Vista Market, Elgin Street Market — encourage people to walk to their local market,” Penton said. “One component of the elusive one-minute neighbourhood, we believe this to be a key detail in building loyalty between local vendors and their customer base.”
With live music, programming for kids and plentiful seating, Ottawa Street Markets has created a “pretty nice experience,” he said. But “these might be a few features ByWard let slip over the years.”
As he prepares to shutter his family’s business, Deiner says it’s “too late” for Saslove’s. But at least one city architect hasn’t given up on the potential of the Market.
Toon Dreessen, principal architect and president of Architects DCA, said that while the ByWard Market is an “ideal 15-minute neighbourhood,” the city has not addressed the “root problems” that are causing issues for business owners.
“We’ve allowed the Market to really decline,” he said. “It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, because we need more fruit and vegetables and market sellers and to attract that we need to have more people. To attract more people, we need to have less parking and more pedestrian space and a more welcoming public realm that’s safer and more equitable and more accessible.
“And we don’t have that because we have too much parking. We have too much parking because we don’t have enough sellers of fruits and vegetables to demand the number of people that are there,” he continued. “So it’s a sort of continuous cycle.”
Concern over safety, crime and security in the Market is also contributing to the issue, Dreessen added. But instead of an increased police presence or “Band-Aid” fixes, he says the city needs to examine the Market “holistically.”
“We’re not doing enough to support the operation of businesses and our response is to say, essentially, ‘There’s a concern about crime in the Market, so we’re going to put in some cops,’” he said. “That’s not the solution. The solution is to look at the root cause, which is usually housing and mental health and addiction.”
To support businesses, the city must be willing to fund a “major” overhaul of the Market and engage public and private stakeholders, he said.
“We can tick a box and say, ‘Look, we’ve added these police, so that’s going to help.’ But is it? Is that going to help, or is that going to stigmatize the unhoused even more?” Dreessen said. “What if the root cause could be solved for half the amount of money if we said, ‘We’re going to deal with the unhoused crisis by providing housing.’
“It’s not going to happen with a narrowly scoped, marginalized request for proposal where we get one idea from one firm with one approach that meets the brief of whatever has been written by city staff,” Dreessen continued. “We need a holistic, collaborative, integrated design approach that thinks about all of the solutions that we need to address all of the issues.”
