Strong winds shut down the last Montrose Farmers Market before the holidays
Nearly every Sunday morning for the past five years, Steve Pierce, the marketplace manager of the Montrose Farmers Market, leaves his La Crescenta home at about 4:30 a.m. and makes his way down to tend to the Vietnam War Memorial at Ocean View Boulevard and Honolulu Avenue.
The trip is nearly always made hours before Pierce heads to the Farmers Market to manage and oversee the roughly 30 market vendors throughout the morning, alongside Mark Sheridan, who takes care of the 40 or so farmer and food vendors.
However, this past Sunday, on his routine check of the memorial, Pierce recalled noticing the high winds that came in overnight were still blowing.
“I went down to the memorial to take a look at the flowers and the flags, and they were just whipping all around, so I thought ‘Boy, this is gonna be interesting today,’” Pierce said.
It wasn’t long after Pierce arrived to set up the kid’s area at the market that his phone started to ring with calls from vendors who said the strong winds would make it difficult and unsafe to set up tents along the 2300 block of Honolulu.
It was around 6:30 a.m. when the winds were “just treacherous,” Pierce said.
“We would get the sustained winds at maybe 25 mph, which even [in] that situation is kind of dicey to set up tents, but it was once we got the gusts — that’s what really did it in for us,” he said.
The strong gusts moved barricades into the streets and landscaping along Honolulu. Pierce also had to help retrieve a vendor’s tent that flew up into nearby trees.
With his usual partner, Sheridan, helping with evacuations due to the Santa Barbara fire and unable to attend Sunday, Pierce alone made the call to close the market.
His swift decision was validated shortly after when a Glendale fire inspector came to make sure the market was shut down.
That Sunday was to be the last farmers market before the holidays because it will be closed until Jan. 7.
Pierce said it was especially unfortunate because the winds had died down by about 11 a.m., around the time when many shoppers arrive after church services.
“We very seldom close down, even during rain, with the exception of one intense rainfall in January,” he said.
Pat Crowder, who operates “Pat in the Hat,” has sold skin-care products at the market the past dozen years. She arrived in the early morning with about 70 jars of skin-care items ready to sell, but she said she saw no tents and the produce vendors were packing to leave.
“I could understand closing, because the wind was horrendous,” Crowder said. “But I was extremely disappointed that our last day at the market [until January] was closed.”
Twitter: @JeffLanda
