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City Life

More city than farm at weekend Ybor market

By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published March 26, 2005

There has been so much buzz about the farmers market in downtown St. Petersburg and next to none about the Ybor City Fresh Market, I decided to drive to Ybor Saturday and take a look.

Farmers markets have become the sine qua non of urban life. I love them, when they are as billed - i.e., vendors selling farm fresh milk and eggs, vegetables with dirt still on the roots, herbs by the bucket, fresh-killed chickens and fresh-cut flowers. Markets like this are so outrageously popular every city wants one, but at most it's hard to find even one real farmer.

I pulled in front of the Ybor City Museum at Ninth Avenue and 18th Street and was standing in the middle of the street trying to determine if my spot was legal when a man in ball cap asked, "Looking for a place to park?"

Go around the corner, he told me. The lot is free until 10 p.m. I entered Centennial Park sniffing for anything fresh and edible but ran smack into an array of high-fashion handbags. The Coach bags are real, said the vendor; the rest are knockoffs. His friend in New York sends them down. He came to Tampa for family reasons, and after losing a great loft in New York's meatpacking district, he decided to stay and is looking for a place.

Where? I asked.

"St. Petersburg."

He gets really good vibes there, he said. The young woman at the next table had just bought a house in one of St. Petersburg's affordable older neighborhoods. It struck me that these were the kind of people who used to live in Tampa.

Last Saturday, the market also had something going on called "Authors in the Park." Here and there authors sat at tables with their books.

James Oettel was sitting in the sun with his wife and his tiny dog resting in a carrier. They're from Sun City Center.

"This is the cave he lived in," his wife told me, pointing to the photo on the cover of Root-Hog or Die.

That's right, during the Depression, in Missouri he and his family lived in a cave.

"It was 54 degrees in the cave," he said, but when they built a fire - outside, since there was no ventilation in the cave - it warmed up very quickly. "It was really very comfortable," he said.

Kind of hard to beat that story.

At a table behind a book titled Gordon Solie ... Something Left Behind sat a couple who turned out to be Solie's daughter and son-in-law, Pam and Bob Allyn. They had compiled photos, stories and poems by the famed Tampa wrestling announcer, and their book came out in January. Donald Trump ordered a copy, their kids discovered from the return address, and they heard Jeb Bush has asked a mutual friend to bring him a book.

At another table, the Gerber baby was selling her books. Ann Turner Cook was indeed that photogenic baby but now writes Florida mysteries. Jack Fernandez, a retired University of South Florida chemistry professor whose grandparents came here from Cuba in the 1800s, was selling his first historical novel, Cafe Con Leche. Brandon author Betty Bradford Byers was selling five of her books and reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. The Port Tampa City Woman's Club had a history and cookbook for sale.

More authors and books, adoptable greyhounds, the Avon lady, rhinestone dog collars, handcrafted fountain pens, pine needle baskets, Australian emu oil - from free-ranging natural-food-eating emus, not American emus who probably eat at McDonald's. The oil comes from a sac on the back of the emu's neck. Riverview vendors Lori and Terry Dittle said they sell a lot of it on eBay.

So, is there a farmer anywhere? I asked them.

Oh, sure. Over there.

A tall young man in a Bucs T-shirt stood at a table laden with tomatoes like baseballs and big juicy strawberries, zucchini and other green stuff. Was he a real farmer?

No. He had been selling herbs grown in his South Tampa back yard, and when the market's produce vendor quit, he was asked to fill in. He goes to the Plant City market at 4 a.m. and buys right off the trucks. His name is Ryan Hayes.

Actually, he is an actor, and the name of his new enterprise is Poser Produce.

Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at sandrathompson1@mac.com City Life appears on Saturday.

[Last modified March 26, 2005, 01:08:17]