The last two sellers on the market hall's north row

Thirty stalls in 1998, two today. What happened to the other twenty-eight, told by the people who stayed.

The north row of the market hall is three hundred feet long and, on a Thursday morning, almost silent. Two stalls are open. The rest are shuttered with the same corrugated steel they were fitted with in the early nineties, and most of the padlocks have rusted shut.

Dolores has sold olives here since she was nineteen. She remembers the row full, she says, and remembers exactly when it stopped being full: not a single year, but a slow decade in which the wholesalers moved out to the interstate and the customers followed the parking.

The arithmetic is not complicated. A stall on the north row costs the same as a stall on the south row, which faces the street. The south row sells to people walking past. The north row sells to people who came looking.

Those two sentences explain almost everything about the last twenty-five years here, and they explain why the other twenty-eight stalls are shut rather than cheaper. The rent is set by the market, not by the row, and nobody has changed it.

What is left is a trade that runs on being known. Dolores has customers who have bought from her for thirty years and who would not buy olives anywhere else, and that is a real business, but it is not a business you can inherit. Her son works at the port authority.

The market hall management says a renovation of the north row is planned. It has been planned, in one form or another, since 2014. Meanwhile the two remaining sellers open at six, as they always have, and the row stays quiet until the light comes through the roof at about half past nine.