The Dock Street Market was Philadelphia's central wholesale produce market from 1870 until 1959, busiest between midnight and eight in the morning while produce moved between trucks and warehouses. By the late 1950s Society Hill was considered a slum, and the market had become known for congestion, noise before dawn and the vermin feeding on discarded produce. The city planning director convinced the city to spend $17 million acquiring land and investing in infrastructure, and from 1957 to 1959 three bodies bought 31 acres around Dock Street, relocated and demolished the market, and set aside five acres for what became Society Hill Towers. In June 1959 the merchants moved to a new Food Distribution Center in South Philadelphia.
Then comes the number, and it is the best single fact on this page. A 1968 study of the trade counted the firms before and after. In 1958 there were 117 small wholesalers handling under 3,000 tons a year, 35 medium-sized firms and 55 large ones: 207 in total. By 1964 there were 64 small, 39 medium and 51 large: 154. Almost the entire loss was among the small firms. The move, in the study's own framing, changed the structure of the trade by centralising distribution through a smaller number of larger wholesalers.
Today the market's own merchant directory lists 18. So the arc is 207 wholesalers in 1958, 154 in 1964, and 18 now, and one company on this page tells the same story from inside. Collotti & Sons was established in 1975 by Jack Collotti Sr., described on its own site as a longtime employee of Max Feldbaum and Sons. Max Feldbaum and Sons is not on the current merchant list, and we captured nothing about what happened to it.
It is worth being clear that Dock Street was not the only market: in 1958 it was one of four, alongside the Callowhill Street Market, the Baltimore and Ohio Produce Terminal, which handled auction sales only, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The consolidation this page describes swallowed all of them.
