Serving the Community with Quality Products Since 2000
The Riverfront Market is a bustling public marketplace in an historic warehouse on the banks of the Christina River on Wilmington’s Riverfront. Since November 16, 2000, the Market has occupied the space at 3 South Orange Street that features vaulted ceilings, heavy timber construction and exposed brick walls.
Inside, the Market boasts a European-style marketplace that features plenty of café style seating and high quality foods from local, independently-owned merchants. Vendors occupy the ground floor of the building, where they sell soft beverages (hot and cold), fresh produce (fruits and vegetables), meats, seafood, baked goods, pizza, sandwiches, soups, salads, snacks and authentic Sushi and Thai cuisine, as well as other food related items.
The open second-story provides seating for visitors with an overhead view of the Market. It’s the ideal place to meet, shop for a prepared meal or gather the freshest ingredients for the recipe waiting for you at home.
Most of the Riverfront Market merchants also offer a catering menu for meetings and events.
The Early History of the Riverfront Market Building
Between 1825-1880, the building was used for shipbuilding by partnerships like Harris & Woodcock and J. and J.A. Harris. There was a wheelwright shop and lumber yards in the area between Orange and Shipley Streets. James Murphy operated a coal and wood business for several years, using the Shipley Street Wharf.
In 1882, Daniel H. Kent, principal of D.H. Kent & Company, manufacturer’s agents and importers of iron and coach materials, purchased the western portion of the parcel and land and, apparently as a speculative venture, erected the Kent Building, that was subsequently sold and used for warehousing and as the site for a saw mill.
Kent was quick to see the advantage of an industrial site as well situated as the real estate located just down Shipley Street from his store. The land lay between Orange and Shipley with access to the Christina, a waterway that annually handled freight from a myriad of nearby wharves. In addition, at the time of his 1882 land purchase the northeast boundary of the property was adjacent to two railroads, the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore, chartered in 1832 and still known locally as the PW&B, although it had been taken over in 1881 by the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Baltimore and Ohio, whose tracks ran along Water Street.
1898-1964: F.C. Blumenthal and Company, leather manufacturers, purchased the property building and used it to store goat skins and finished morocco leather.
The Blumenthal Company was the most significant early occupant of the building, remembered for the extremely fine quality leather it produced and for the scale of its operations.
The Blumenthal firm had its beginnings in 1881 when Charles Mullen left his partnership with Isaac T. Quigley and set up his own morocco factory. A decade later Ferdinand Blumenthal and Julian Ullman bought the company Mullen had started and acquired properties adjacent to the factory. These real estate acquisitions enabled them to enlarge the building in which the leather tanning operations took place until the manufacturing plant filled an entire city block, leading the new owners to claim in the early years of the twentieth century that they owned the second largest morocco factory in the world.
Blumenthal bought the Kent Building in 1898, not for more manufacturing capacity but for storage, both of goat skins that had been imported from Mexico and South America for processing into leather and of finished morocco that would eventually be shipped away to New York for the manufacture of shoes. As they had done at their manufacturing site, the partners enlarged the storage facility, adding the two-story brick wing at the rear of the Kent Building, further expanding its storage capacity.
The company, that changed its name in 1919 to Amalgamated Leather Companies, owned the Kent Building until 1964.
The first tannery in Wilmington was established in 1845. The 1860 census recorded that leather production from Wilmington tanneries was valued at $894,980. By 1900, the leather companies’ output was worth $9,379,504, and, in terms of the number of people employed, leather tanning was second only to the manufacture of railroad cars.
As late as 1959, the city’s business community claimed that Wilmington was the world’s leader in the production of glazed kid and morocco leather. The Kent Building is the only surviving link between the Christina waterfront and the leather industry that flourished in Wilmington from the mid-nineteenth century until well into the twentieth.
If offers a unambiguous and tangible reminder of the sort of growth the industry enjoyed in the late nineteenth century, as successful entrepreneurs expanded their real estate holdings to match their growing businesses.
In 1976, Berger Brothers acquired the Kent Building and used it as a warehouse for their furniture business.
The Wilmington Riverfront has seen substantial growth over the past 17 years including:
The Blue Rocks Stadium was built - 1993
Tubman-Garrett Park was developed – 1998
The Riverfront Market & Restaurant Pad – 2000
B & O Railroad Station Refurbished – 2001 (now home to ING Direct)
Harry’s Seafood Grill opened – 2003
