Lexington Market has been in the same location in Baltimore since 1782. It has all the hop of a large, living city. Foot traffic is heavy with food of all kinds -- ready to eat on the spot or fresh for you to take home to cook yourself. Vendors with all sorts of goods line the surrounding streets as well as dotting the massive indoor market.
My dad (in the ‘50s and ‘60s) would take off a week each summer to drive a load of watermelons to the market. He’d drive his cousin Charles Herman Carter’s 18-wheeler with an open slat-sided trailer loaded with watermelons raised by Uncle Herman at Carter’s Crossroads. I worked the picking and loading those some of those crops.
On this trip to visit Emily (and see her get her Masters of Science in International Public Health), I finally answered my longtime question about why he did that for a vacation. (He died when I was in high school, so I never could just ask.) It was pretty simple: He got the same exhilaration from the town I get now. I love Baltimore.