Reading Terminal Market

The Reading Terminal Market sits beneath a massive steel train shed that spans an entire city block without a single support column in the middle. When the Reading Railroad built this terminal in eighteen ninety-two, they needed a way to manage the city's crowded food supply. They cleared out existing street-level markets and moved the vendors directly into the structure's lower level. Farmers once hitched their wagons in the basement, while locomotives thundered on the tracks directly overhead.