Farmers Markets Serve Communities Throughout Chicagoland

The Chicago area’s best-known farmers markets, such as Green City Market and Logan Square Farmers Market, have long enjoyed popularity among those devoted to eating fresh, locally produced food. While the selection is incredible and vendors and attendees come from across our region, in recent years, these big markets have been drawing throngs of visitors each weekend.

While some thrive in big events, others prefer a calmer atmosphere in which they can leisurely curate their purchases and get on a first-name basis with the vendors. Fortunately, the region’s map is dotted with dozens of neighborhood and suburban markets with more laid-back personalities, shorter lines and few, if any, human traffic jams. Here are six examples of neighborhood markets to consider, each with its own distinct character.

The Lincoln Park Farmers Market, Saturdays, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., 2001 N. Orchard Street, Chicago. Located on the parking lot of Lincoln Park High School, this market is the smaller cousin to Green City Market’s flagship location just three-quarters of a mile to the east and open the same days and times. Yet The Lincoln Park Farmers Market—now in its 42nd year—succeeds on its own terms.

Elsa M. Jacobson manages The Lincoln Park Farmers Market and sees its community market identity as its counterpoint to the Green City’s bustle. “We are busy, but it is always a friendly sort of busy,” Jacobson says. “While certain vendors do have lines, they are manageable and the wait time is never onerous.”

She continues, “It is gratifying to see neighbors running into neighbors and friends running into friends, especially as our attendance grows! Given the joy with which the market has been greeted this season and the growth we are experiencing, I have to believe folks are finding the neighborliness and community they seek at a neighborhood farmers market with their weekly market visit.”

Green City Market West Loop. Photo by Bob Benenson.

Green City Market West Loop, Saturdays, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Mary Bartelme Park, 115 S. Sangamon, Chicago. Even though Green City’s Lincoln Park location draws thousands, its management recognizes that neighborhood markets have their own following. That’s why they created a Saturday satellite market about three-and-a-half miles away in the West Loop.

Most farmers markets these days welcome shoppers to bring their well-behaved dogs with them. But if you really love pooches, then the West Loop market is for you: it shares the city-run Mary Bartelme Park which has its very own dog park.

The park’s centerpiece is a plaza with a series of metal “gates” that double as a fountain (when the space isn’t crowded with shoppers and vendors). The park also has topography that is unusual for a farmers market. There is a small hill in the middle of the park; for the past few years, vendor Jacobson Family Farms, based in Antioch (55 miles to the north), has been king of that hill.

The Oak Park Farmers Market is located in the parking lot of a historic church. Photo by Bob Benenson.

Oak Park Farmers Market, Saturdays, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., 460 Lake Street (parking lot of Pilgrim Congregational Church), Oak Park. In its 48th year serving Oak Park, a suburb on Chicago’s western border, this market has become something of a landmark—no mean trick, given that the city teems with sites associated with famous natives such as Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright.

With the historic church building as its backdrop, the Oak Park market enjoys a fairly typical mix of larger farms that are pillars of the region’s farmers market community and smaller vendors, as well. There are a couple of touches, though, that are all Oak Park. One is the booth selling fresh doughnuts, made onsite (follow the aroma and the long line). And there is a pick-up bluegrass band with rotating musicians, some of whom have been entertaining shoppers for decades.

A vendor stand at Austin Town Hall City Market on June 8, its season-opening date.

Austin Town Hall City Market, Austin Town Hall Park, Thursdays, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., 5610 W. Lake Street, Chicago. The market, in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, is just a mile east of the site of the Oak Park Farmers Market, but that mile is wide, demographically and economically. Nearly 70 percent of Oak Park residents are white, while more than three-quarters of Austin residents are Black. Median household income in Oak Park is nearly $100,000, but it’s well under half that amount in Austin.

These circumstances have made it difficult for Austin Town Hall City Market (run by the public Chicago City Markets program) to build a robust customer base. But Veah Larde, the new market manager, has deep community roots and is so determined to turn the market into a catalyst for economic revival that she has put her Two Sisters Catering company on hiatus until November. “I am an Austin girl,” Larde says. “I was born and raised here. It’s ingrained in me, I get it.”

Larde believes that the market can help restore the community spirit that diminished over decades of economic decline and rising crime rates. “The farmers market is not just the food; it’s all of the things that make the people attending feel like this was a great experience. The vendors get to know your name when you come out. That makes people feel invested.”

61st Street Farmers Market. Photo by Bob Benenson.

61st Street Farmers Market, Saturdays,  7 a.m. to 2 p.m., 6100 S. Blackstone Avenue, Chicago. The 61st Street market is the biggest farmers market on Chicago’s South Side. Located on a paved lot shaded by trees in the adjacent park, its customer base reflects its proximity to the University of Chicago just a couple of blocks north in the Hyde Park neighborhood.

But the market is physically located in Woodlawn, a mostly Black and under-resourced community. The market is dedicated to equity and providing greater access to nutritious, locally produced food for lower-income individuals.

The market is a program of Experimental Station, a nonprofit that also runs Link Up Illinois. This program helps finance the Link Match programs that enable many of our region’s farmers markets (including 61st Street Farmers Market) to double the value of local food assistance benefits for Link recipients. (Link is Illinois’ affiliate of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.)

It would be hard to be more neighborhood than the new location of Chicago’s Uptown Farmers Market. Photo by Bob Benenson.

Uptown Farmers Market, Wednesdays, 2:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., Sunnyside Mall (Sunnyside between Magnolia and Beacon), Chicago. To conclude this tour of neighborhood markets, we stop at Uptown Farmers Market, which each Wednesday takes over a few blocks right in the middle of the Sheridan Park residential neighborhood.

Its relocation this year to the Sunnyside (pedestrian) Mall is quite literally giving the Uptown farmers market its day in the sun. The market was started in 2021 by Chicago Market, a developing food co-op that will be located in a historic building adjacent to the Wilson Red Line L station. The Uptown Farmers Market spent its first two years in that building’s parking lot, shadowed by the elevated train tracks.

Uptown Farmers Market 2.0 is in a much more amenable setting. In walking down Sunnyside from Clark St. on the west, the street becomes permanently blocked off at Beacon; during a May visit, fragrant lilac bushes mark the start of the mall. And rather than the streetscape of huge metal pillars at its previous site, there is a canopy of trees with other plantings.

Bob Benenson is the publisher and writer of Local Food Forum, a newsletter that covers all aspects of the local food community in the Chicago region. He can be contacted at [email protected].