The popular weekly crafts market that for the past five years has called downtown Silver Spring’s Veterans Plaza home will be looking for a new location next year.
Megan Moriarty, owner and manager of the Fenton Street Market, announced Thursday that the “crafts, culture and community marketplace” will no longer be located at Veterans Plaza, the county-owned site in front of the Silver Spring Civic Building in the middle of downtown Silver Spring.
“We’re not needed there and there are other places in Silver Spring that could use the community-building that the market brings,” Moriarty told Bethesda Beat.
“I would really like to go back to our roots,” Moriarty said, referring to how a group of Silver Spring residents started the market in 2009 in a parking lot at the corner of Silver Spring Avenue and Fenton Street in the Fenton Village neighborhood.
“I’d like to go back to Fenton Village,” she said. “I think there’s plenty of new energy in Fenton Village with all the local businesses that have opened there since we started.”
The market regularly hosted musicians, enlisted vendors offering items including handmade jewelry, soap and vintage bicycles and served as a place for members of civic groups to meet and promote their causes. At Veterans Plaza, it operated each Saturday from April to October.
The market almost left in 2011, when Montgomery County said it would require a formal Request for Proposals to use the space. At the time, market founder Hannah McCann said the fees proposed by the county to use the space were too expensive to keep the market operating there.
The county eventually made changes to its Request for Proposals and the market remained.
Moriarty told Bethesda Beat she’d prefer to focus on the market’s future and the final event on the plaza, a special holiday market from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dec. 19.
“Join us for last-minute shopping & to say farewell,” Moriarty wrote in the announcement.
