Market Weathers the Years : Open-Air Stalls Still Thriving After Six Decades in L.A.

The strangest sights in Los Angeles have been served up for six decades over at Blanche Magee’s lunch counter.

There was the day the world’s only combination drive-in, walk-in movie theater opened next door. The day motorists started pumping their own at the country’s first self-service gas station out back. The time they built a swimming pool for Esther Williams and then drained it after one swim. The weekend that 500 USC Trojan busts were molded out of vanilla ice cream as wedding favors.

Magee’s lunch counter is in the middle of Farmers Market, the plain-wrapped Los Angeles landmark that has survived the Depression, recessions and redevelopment schemes and today will mark its 60th anniversary in ceremonies at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue.

Blanche Magee was there the first morning in 1934 when 17 egg ranchers, fruit growers and produce farmers from the San Fernando Valley parked their beat-up trucks at the corner and began hawking their wares. She sat on a wood box and carved a ham to feed the hungry growers.

Now 96 and living in Claremont, she plans to return for today’s 11 a.m. commemoration beneath Farmers Market’s famed clock tower.

After that, she’ll stop by Magee’s lunch counter--the last of the original Farmers Market tenants--to check on the turkey sandwiches and on the fresh peanut butter that daughter-in-law Phyllis Magee still churns out each day from a 1903 peanut grinding machine.

Farmers Market’s first year was a nightmare, according to Blanche Magee, who remembers winter rains turning the dirt field into a quagmire that almost buried the farmers.

“My husband and I begged the tenants to stay one more year because the sun would shine again,” according to Magee. “They did.”

The Magees brought the first electricity into the market so they could refrigerate their homemade products and built the first restrooms so shoppers did not have to traipse down the street to use a gas station’s toilets. Magee remembers battling with market operators to replace orange-crate seating with diners’ tables and chairs. Market co-founder Roger Dahlhjelm was worried the changes would ruin the original idea of the market.

Dahlhjelm had been a down-on-his-luck former Stanley Steamer car salesman when he teamed up with a friend, advertising writer Fred Beck, to propose a village marketplace where families and craftsmen could rent stalls and sell their wares.

Landowner Earl B. Gilmore refined their idea, persuading them to set up a place where Depression-plagued Valley farmers could sell their goods to city dwellers.

The market was not all that Gilmore installed on his property, which had earlier been enriched when oil was discovered during drilling for a water well. In 1934 he also built an 18,000-seat sports stadium for auto racing, Esther Williams’ one-time water ballet and games by the Bulldogs, Los Angeles’ first professional football team.

The huge Pan-Pacific Auditorium opened in 1935. A ballpark for the city’s first baseball team, the Hollywood Stars, sprang up next to the market in 1938. The self-serve station (with a nickel-per-gallon discount for pumping your own) opened in the 1940s. The walk-in, drive-in opened in 1948.

None of those places survived. But Farmers Market has thrived: These days it draws about 10,000 shoppers (60% of them are tourists) each weekday. And loyal supporters have balked at ideas to modernize it--including a $300-million redevelopment plan proposed in the late 1980s.

Any future construction will “build on the character” of the market, Hank Hilty, a grandson of Gilmore and current president of the A.F. Gilmore Co., promised Wednesday.

A new master plan for the 31-acre site has been approved by city officials that keeps the funky, open-air market as a permanent centerpiece. “We won’t be reducing or removing that at all,” pledged Hilty, a Van Nuys resident.

That’s good news to old-timers and first-time visitors alike.

“A modern concept wouldn’t fit here,” said Ted Smith, who started as a busboy at the market’s Dupar’s Restaurant in 1941 and today manages a staff that serves an average of 1,750 hot cakes every day.

“This is my home,” said Barbara Williams, who has run a tie shop and men’s store there for 39 years. Her customers have included Ronald Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike even held her hand while he told her a story about neckties and West Point.

Over on the south side of the market, where informal groups of writers, homemakers and others meet daily for breakfast, frequent visitor E.F. McGlone was finishing his corned beef sandwich. He and wife, Edna, had driven in from Studio City. “I’ve been coming here 40 years. I like this place the way it is,” he said.

Back at Magee’s lunch counter, near the Farmers Market wishing well where over $325,000 in tossed-in change has been collected for charity since 1949, a busload of tourists was deciding on lunch.

Visitor Jean Lamb of Glasgow, Scotland, bought $32 worth of sandwiches and drinks for her family from Phyllis Magee. “When the tour guide said we were coming here, we thought we were going to a farm. I’m glad we didn’t.”

Magee laughed at that.

“We get wet, we get cold. But I don’t think any of us would change it here,” she said.