The indoor Ferry Building Marketplace provides visitors with a diverse assortment of places to shop, ranging from cafes and restaurants to gourmet breads, cheeses, pastries, and even a specialty mushroom shop. They focus on small, regional producers in order to highlight the great diversity of food and wine production around the Bay Area and Northern California. The market is open seven days a week.

Three days a week,  the outdoor plaza hosts the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.California-certified and operated by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA), this 65,000 square-foot market is also an educational facility, with visitors coming to learn about local food and agriculture.

Located centrally along the embarcadero at the foot of Market Street, the market building and plaza are easily accessible by MUNI (SF’s train and bus system), BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), historic trolley car, ferryboat, foot, and bicycle. The San Francisco City Guides also provide free Ferry Building tours during market hours, and the site hosts is a free gallery containing artifacts building’s civic history.

The Ferry Terminal Markets hosted the 7th Annual International Public Markets Conference in 2009.

San Francisco's beautiful Beaux-Arts Ferry Terminal Building and its surrounding plaza are home to two famous markets, the Ferry Building Marketplace inside and the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market outside. With an open, 660 foot, two-story concourse full of steel arched trusses, brick and terra cotta ornamentation, huge crossed-lattice windows, marble walls and mosaic floors, the Ferry Terminal building is both beautiful and historic. Once the only way of getting into the city of San Fransisco, the A. Page Brown designed terminal was completed in 1898. At its peak, it ushered in some 50,000 commuters per day; however, the construction of two major bridges dramatically reduced ferry traffic to the city. After several restoration attempts, the terminal was re-opened in 2003 to house both the Ferry Building Marketplace and office space. Several large pedestrian spaces outdoors were also restored, including the plaza that plays host to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.

Image credits: PPS Library, Gary Yost Photography via Flickr, Gary Yost Photography via Flickr, Kārlis Dambrāns via Flickr, John Loo via Flickr, Kārlis Dambrāns via Flickr

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