A project to rehabilitate the dilapidated Quonset hut building at the corner of East 6th and Ringgold streets and transform it into the new, permanent home of the Brownsville Farmers’ Market and local office of Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley Inc. is fully funded and the design phase in its final stages.
The former cannery and warehouse, built in 1950 according to county records, will be rechristened “Cannery Public Market” and will feature a kitchen incubator for aspiring market vendors to develop products, plus refrigeration so the Food Bank is able to store perishable goods, said Ramiro Gonzalez, the city’s director of government and community affairs.
“Every city has a marketplace building,” he said. “We do have Market Square, but things have shifted there. It’s not a market. The idea of this building is to have a market building.”
It may allow the Farmers’ Market, run by the Brownsville Wellness Coalition and held Saturday mornings in Linear Park across from the future Cannery Market, to extend its hours beyond the weekend, Gonzalez said. The construction bid for the project should go out “in a couple of months,” with work commencing no later than October, he said.
Gonzalez estimated that the project will take nine to 11 months to complete, which would make for a grand opening in late summer or early fall of 2022. Harlingen-based Megamorphosis Design is the architect.
Several major funding partners stepped up to make it a reality, Gonzalez said. The Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation got the ball rolling in 2019 with a $500,000 grant. The city kicked in another $250,000. A Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, No Kid Hungry, has donated $300,000 to the project, which is also receiving a $700,000 grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, though the city is waiting to announce it until the final grant package is in hand. The estimated total cost of the project is $1.9 million, Gonzalez said.
Meanwhile, the Mitte Foundation is finalizing plans for a comprehensive makeover of the Mitte Cultural District bordering the Cannery Market, which means the entire area — a main portal to downtown — is about to undergo a major facelift.
“We’re pretty much there,” Gonzalez said. “We’re just kind of doing some last minute reviews, putting the bid package together, that kind of stuff. It’s there. It’s complete. It really is happening. Things take a while sometimes, but this is a project and it’s funded.”
