By By Jeanette Hurt

From the February/March 2006 Issue

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The waft of freshly baked baguettes from Piacentine’s Artisan Bread mingles with the scent of roses from Blumen Market, but these delicate smells float away when the roaster at Cedarburg Coffee begins toasting his fresh Kenyan beans.

A little boy — who couldn’t have been more than five — slips away from his parents, who are eating sandwiches and Hawaiian lunch plates. He dances and twirls himself in crazy, happy circles and then, like a sprite, encircles Baumann before being called back to the table. Baumann smiles, but hardly notices the tot — so intense is her gaze and her purpose. Her dream has just come to life, and she still has a few minor things to work out before she can relax, if she ever relaxes at all.

Though the market is Baumann’s brainchild, and she is considered its project leader, her full-time job is running the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corp; the market is her labor of love. “It’s wonderful,” Baumann says, her eyes sparkling almost as much as the amethyst pendant that hangs around her neck. “It’s really exceeded our expectations. I am just so happy Milwaukee has embraced and accepted the market as it has.”

Taking in the size of the crowd, Baumann points out that lunchtime is one of the busiest periods of the day, followed by the after-work shopping crowd and the weekends. Though, admittedly, the weekends are a bit less hectic than they were on the market’s Oct. 15 grand opening, when vendors sold out of almost everything; Piacentine sold out of bread three times before 1 p.m. “We told them to expect 20,000 that weekend, but we didn’t expect all 20,000 to come on the first day,” Baumann notes.

Bringing in more people — especially during the slower times — is one of Baumann’s goals. There are plans to tap into the retiree population and bring in tour groups. In the meantime, there is still much to be done. Baumann and others are still working to put the finishing touches on the market — things like better waste receptacles in the seating area and a more permanent donor’s wall on the elevator. They are also still looking to find a spice vendor and a chocolatier/confectioner. “This is an extremely complicated building in an extremely excellent, but complicated, location,” Baumann says. “And we’re not interested in settling (on vendors). We are only interested in what we think would be the best, would be unique, would be Wisconsin-like, and be individual, owner-operated businesses.”

Lining up enough appropriate vendors, along with regular construction delays, pushed the market’s opening back to the fall. “We thought that our critical number was 17 vendors, and they had to be the right 17,” says Brian O’Malley, market manager. “We still have a ways to go.”

But not much — the market has all but two of its 23 spaces filled, and it has come a long way from nine years ago when Baumann first began championing the fresh food cause with Einer Tangen, attorney and chairman of Business Improvement District #2, and Dick Wright, Riverwalk project coordinator and retired CEO of Northwestern Mutual. Although Baumann first fell in love with markets when she lived in Paris for a year, her interest was renewed when she attended a conference in Seattle in 1996. “I had heard about Pike’s Place (Seattle’s public market), and so I put on running shoes to check it out,” Baumann says. “It was just breathtaking. I was there really early before the shoppers were even there, when the ice gets put down, and the trucks pull up with produce, and the bread is being baked. I didn’t think they had markets like this in the United States, and as I’m running through it, there’s a gentleman carrying this big basket of crabs. This one crab falls out, and I have to jump around him. That crab said to me — you’ve got to build a public market in Milwaukee.”

When Baumann returned to Milwaukee, she spoke with then-Mayor John Norquist, who endorsed the idea, and she spent the next year talking up the market idea to anyone who would listen to her. Tangen and Wright listened to her and joined forces with her, and funding came through for an initial feasibility study. Things started to roll — slowly — from there.

Tangen initially went to a meeting about the market because he thought Betty Quadracci, a local magazine publisher, had endorsed the idea. In reality, a Third Ward business developer, Joanne Anderson (who is now deceased) had asked Quadracci to use her offices for a meeting. “After the meeting, thinking this is something Betty was personally interested in, I said ‘I’ll go back to the board and see if we can get some sort of study going,’” Tangen recalls. “After the meeting, I stayed behind talking to Betty, and I asked her what she thought. She said ‘I never heard of it. I was bamboozled.’ Still, I thought the presentation itself was interesting, and that was the start of it.”

Today, the market has raised more than $9.7 million of the $10 million organizers say is necessary to keep it running for the first three years, which will be the time they estimate to have the market running self-sufficiently. Funding for the market — along with the land needed to make it a reality on the corner of Water St. and St. Paul Ave., right underneath the expressway — came from private donors, as well as state, federal and city funding. The market is owned by the Historic Third Ward District and operated by Milwaukee Public Market Inc., a

non-profit corporation.

Located near where the old Commission Row area housed several public markets in the earlier part of the 20th century, the market is expected to bring in more than a million visitors every year — who will spend $10.5 million. The 21,500-square-foot market is projected to create 120 full-time jobs, plus an additional 45 to 65 seasonal employees when it is completely filled. There are also more than 100 free parking spaces in the market’s lot, making it easily accessible.

“From the beginning, we quickly learned that when you’re talking about a public market, it’s like you’re showing people a many-faceted diamond, and everybody sees a different slice of it, a different reflection of what it could be,” Tangen says. “For some people, it is a place to promote organic produce. For others, it’s a community gathering place. Others see it as a small business incubator, and others see it as a way to provide farmers with an outlet to allow them to be sustainable. The fact is, it’s all of those things.”

In any case, the market is a haven for food lovers of all ages and all backgrounds. “There are plenty of UFOs — unidentifiable food objects,” Baumann points out to a writer, tailing after her as she briskly walks through her paradise. Starfish fruits and edible cactuses line the produce at El Rey foods. Cheese-stuffed artichoke hearts and at least half a dozen olive varieties are marinating in the deli case at Ceriello Fine Foods. Date paste and tahini — along with lots and lots of different rices, legumes and grains — are sold at Oskri Organics. And case after case of some of the freshest seafood in the Midwest glistens at St. Paul Seafood.

Though the market’s offerings seem like they could be sections of a grocery store, the market is not a grocer — there is no toilet paper on sale in aisle 11, no soda in aisle 23, and there aren’t any little old ladies giving away free samples of heavily prepared, processed and preservative-ridden offerings.

There are free samples — but of a different sort. Old-fashioned chocolate chip cookies baked by Lisa Crum in her C. Adams Bakery, creamy pea soup with dumplings by Dave Jurena at The Soup Market, or fresh, seasonal strawberries at Fields Best produce. “In a grocery store, even a high-end one, fish, meat or produce is not their sole focus,” Jurena says. “Here, at the market, each individual business is owned by the person running it. There’s a whole lot more pride in running it, and if all we’re doing is soup, then we’re really going to concentrate on doing the best ones we can. We make stock for people to take home and maybe some croutons and dips, but that is it. There is a different level of seriousness to what you’re selling.”

This seriousness — especially the samples and tastes at the market — encourages spontaneous purchases, Tangen explains. “This is not a grocery or a place to stop once a week and pick up a few aspirin, six pounds of hamburger and some frozen food,” Tangen says. “Public markets are really about impulse purchases. You tasted some incredible Italian sausage so you head to the market, but then, you see some tomatoes or taste some cheese and say, ‘Gosh, this is really incredible cheese, and it’s made by a local farmer so give me a pound of that.’ That’s what happens.”

Not only are goods produced by local farmers, but at Fields Best produce, customers will often find local farmers manning the stall. “Instead of growing things for people who are anonymous, the farmers get to know their consumers,” says Ronald Doetch, executive director of Fields Best, which not only sells produce, but also assists farmers with their growing practices. “And the consumers will get to know the farmers, who we consider to be our celebrities.”

And while you can pick up sushi and soup to go, it’s not the heat-and-serve, packaged offerings of a grocery store, nor the fast-food mentality dished out at mall food courts, even though there is seating for about 100 people in the upstairs balcony. “This is not for the chains, this is not a food court,” Baumann says. “Eighty-five percent of everything bought at the market is to go home to make at home. Grab that coffee, grab that sweet roll, make a sandwich — but this is not a food court.”

The design of the market is also anything but a typical food court. It hails its inspiration from the fabled Parisian market, Les Halles, which was torn down in the early 1970s to make room for the Georges Pompidou Center for Art and Culture. “The major issue for us was that it truly was an urban site with all of the rough edges and toughness that you find in an urban site, one in the shadow of the expressway, bounded by four busy streets,” says Paul Rushing, an architect with Kubala Washatko Architects of Cedarburg, who designed the Milwaukee Public Market.

The building itself boasts a delicate wrought-iron-and-glass framework, featuring a lot of natural light and reflecting the Third Ward’s heritage of warehouses and even previous markets. But it doesn’t mimic any existing buildings, nor does it stand out awkwardly. “There was a lot of attention given to continuing the character of the historic Third Ward, and we aligned with certain courses and rhythms in which the structure expressed itself that are reminiscent of things,” Rushing says. “But it’s not a replica of anything, and it’s a very contemporary expression of an old idea.”

That idea also includes a demonstration kitchen with 55 seats for students where free demonstrations and paying classes will be held. “The demonstrations and the cooking classes bring in everything from the haute-cuisine type of classes to the basic sauce, or how-to- chop-up-a-chicken classes,” Baumann says. Already popular are $10 traffic jam classes held right after work during the week. This demonstration kitchen is named in honor of Madame Kuony, a former Fond du Lac-based cooking instructor and Milwaukee restaurateur, who espoused using the freshest and best ingredients possible.

This emphasis on freshness is something Milwaukee and, frankly, the upper Midwest, has never seen — despite the fact that Wisconsin is one of the nation’s biggest producers of organic products. “Almost everything organic goes to the Twin Cities or the Chicago area,” says Tangen, who used to own the old Café Marche in the Third Ward. “It used to be really frustrating to me to live in the largest city in this organic-producing state, and to have producers say they wouldn’t come to Milwaukee.”

But now, not only producers are coming to Milwaukee, so are the consumers. “I just love this,” Baumann says, gesturing with her hands expansively. “Yesterday, I picked up some mussels and made a seafood stew. I don’t know what I’ll make tonight.”