Historically the urban market functioned as the agora, the center of social and civic life, as well as the commercial center of every city and town. While urban markets still function in this capacity to varying degrees around the world, the urban market in the United States can be traced through a series of diminishments: Its economic centrality was first challenged by the emergence of the grocery store, and then by advancing technologies of distribution and refrigeration systems, and finally by the multifunctionality and mass appeal of the enclosed shopping mall. In contemporary America, the cultural centrality of the traditional market has long been suspended. There are however undeniable residues that remain, especially in Philadelphia, where traces of the European market typology continue in different forms, scales, and disposition to city morphology. The task in 502 each year is to acquaint ourselves with a specific slice of the great literature of the city and to propose a building on a given site which reflects upon this relational premise. Here an understanding of “site” isone which incorporates local contingencies as a well as an expanded relationship with not only physical infrastructures but also with politics, demographics, economies, climates, and all of the complex histories that intertwine these together.