Reading Terminal Market

This guide to Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia starts with a dispute that never got settled: old record books can't agree on the exact width or height of the iron train shed overhead, only that it was the largest single span of its kind when Wilson Brothers and Company finished it in 1893. It traces why the space below sat empty at street level while a vast refrigerated cellar kept meat and produce cold, and how the railroad's president paid off two older markets rather than fight them for the land. Look up at the double-rolled iron trusses still overhead, original to that 1893 shed.