Union Market

This guide to Union Market in Washington, D.C. starts with the sound of a tennis match on the market's roof today, then rewinds to 1931, when it opened as an all-night wholesale terminal for farmers and butchers. It follows an exhausted crew of vendors who formed their own bowling squad, the Recreation Duckpin League, and traces how by 1949 a trainer named Billy Edwards turned an upstairs space into a boxing gym nicknamed the Stillman of the South, drawing fighters through Washington's segregated boxing era.