The history of Reading Terminal spurs a new collection at Penn

Back when David K. O’Neil was the newly-hired manager of the Reading Terminal Market in 1980, he documented the down-and-out conditions with photographs of the market’s abandoned stalls, ghostly aisles, and filth-strewn alleys. In the years ahead, as he helped the market rebound, O’Neil collected everyday ephemera that embodied the market’s new life. Market posters and pins, menus and vendor bags, copies of the terminal’s fledgling newspaper, Market Fare — and thousands more of candid photos that captured day-to-day life in the Philly food institution.

When O’Neil left the Reading Terminal in 1990 to work in public markets across the globe, he kept collecting. The tens of thousands of items he amassed over four decades, and carefully curated and stored in his Roxborough home, span centuries and continents. His collection is considered the most mammoth trove of public market materials in the world.

O’Neil’s market memorabilia will soon be open to the public.

In late 2023, O’Neil, 70, an international market consultant and Penn alum, sold and partially donated his collection to Penn Libraries. Starting next month, O’Neil’s market relics will be available for viewing at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. While the collection provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into O’Neil’s tenure at the terminal, a critical time of rebirth in the market’s 131 history, it also extends far back with vintage materials from 22 other past and present Philly markets. In all, the collection covers market sites in hundreds of American cities and other countries.

For months, a team of Penn curators have been cataloging and conserving O’Neil’s market curios and nearly 100,000 images. Mitch Fraas, director of special collections and research services at Kislak, said that with nothing else like it, the archive can serve as a critical resource for students, researchers and market enthusiasts in fields as varied as history and food studies, design and urban planning, and anthropology and sociology.

“For anyone who is interested in Philadelphia, in the origins of the market movement, in changes in social structures in the 1980s, this will be a deep archive,” Fraas said.

Moreover, Fraas said, the collection, which includes thousands of vintage market postcards from Philly and beyond, some sweetly inscribed by bygone market travelers, as well as historic Reading Terminal blueprints, designs and floor plans, is just a fascinating teaching tool.

“They’re going to get a glimpse at something they would see nowhere else,” he said.

O’Neil’s market life began by chance. After graduating from Penn in 1977 with a history degree, and working on an archaeology dig in Yugoslavia, he landed a job at Bassetts Ice Cream at the Reading Terminal, in hopes of overhearing dialogue for a mystery novel he was writing. But after one shift of scooping ice cream, an encounter with a Reading Company official led to a job luring new tenants to the market. That position eventually led to O’Neil becoming general manager of the entire market.

“I just became the manager because there wasn’t a manager,” O’Neil said, with a laugh.

Growing up Wyndmoor, O’Neil had fond memories of Reading Terminal. But when he took the helm, the market was in tatters, only years removed from bankruptcy.

“I realized that if I was going to get people to move into the market, I was going to have to clean up the bathrooms, clean the floors, get the dead rats out of the aisles,” he said.

Throwing himself into the work, he hired photographers to shoot the detritus.

“For posterity,” he said.

Finding no historical records in the market office, he visited other regional markets and scoured flea markets and vintage sales, buying public market photos, postcards, posters — anything that could offer inspiration on how to improve things.

“I just kind of self-educated,” he said.

He quickly realized there was no market for public market memorabilia.

“No one else was collecting anything about markets,” he said. “So I did.”

He collected pamphlets advertising market events and pins championing the market’s new air conditioners (“Reading Terminal Market is Cool!”, it read.) Digging back further on his memorabilia hunts, he found prints of the old High Street Market sheds photos from the construction of Reading Terminal, a 1913 market floor plan found buried in a security office, and cork bag holders long ago engraved by Reading Terminal provision peddlers: (“William B. Magerum: Victualer,” one reads.)

“The sort of ephemeral stuff that never survives but tells a story,” Fraas said.

And photos. Reams and reams of photos. Cheerier ones as the market transformed with diverse vendors and a lively Center Court. Smiling shots of now long-gone merchants whose families trace their stalls to the market beginning. Amish families carving out new market legacies. A piano player entertaining crowds on the cheap, upright piano O’Neil installed at Center Court. Forgotten moments in the din of a rejuvenated market that take on deeper meaning with the passage of time.

“That combination of the profound and the ordinary, that is the magic, the alchemy of the market,” said O’Neil.

O’Neil, who has authored a book on the illustrated history of Reading Terminal Market, and a senior associate at Project Public Spaces in New York, also included business records and files, including some from markets in in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world (I said, ‘I’m not afraid, I’m from Philadelphia.”)

The records highlight the universality of public markets — and the merchants who make their livings in them, Fraas said.

“He was coming up with the same issues around what vendors go best together with what types of materials, and what are the costs,” he said.

When O’Neil decided it was time to let go of his market collection, he knew Penn was the right choice.

“I didn’t collect it for myself,” he said. “I collected it to build the field. It helped me. Now it can help other people.”