After years of planning and negotiations with Caltrans and city officials, the Morgan Hill Farmers’ Market has crossed the railroad tracks.
The market, which had operated for years in the much smaller parking lot on Depot Street, relocated in May to the Caltrain Station parking lot on Butterfield Boulevard.
The move has roughly doubled the market’s footprint, allowing organizers to expand the number of vendors and give more space to existing vendors, opening up options to bring a greater variety of produce to the market.
“It’s way more parking for everybody, way more space for my vendors, and then more room to add new vendors,” said the market’s manager Sergio Licardie, a 13-year veteran of the California Farmers’ Markets Association. “It’s just been a great improvement all around.”
The new site offers wider vendor stalls and broader aisles to address crowding issues. The first weekend at the new location drew such large crowds that organizers received complaints about congestion—prompting them to widen the aisles further by trimming space from some vendor stalls.
“I see faces here that I’ve never seen before,” said Jerry Vinciguerra, a longtime vendor at the market running the stall for Roxanne’s Biscotti. “It’s really expanded the traffic flow. Before, everybody was jammed into that warm little aisle.”
The relocation was years in the making. The market manager said negotiations with Caltrans over use of the parking lot and coordination with the city of Morgan Hill took about three years. Vinciguerra said the idea had been floated even longer, recalling a former market manager who mentioned the possibility of moving across the tracks when Vinciguerra first set up at the market, about 14 years ago.
The expanded layout has also brought back at least one vendor who had left. Jennifer Thorp, a vendor with Spade & Plow, a Gilroy-based organic farm, said she returned to the Morgan Hill market after a multi-year hiatus specifically because of the new setup.
“We like the setup better here,” she said. “I think it opened up to more people within the market.”
Licardie said the market will hold at its current size for now while organizers gauge how it performs at the new site, with the option to expand the market’s footprint along the lot if demand warrants it. One constraint: a third aisle is off-limits to preserve access to adjacent handicap-accessible parking spaces.
The expanded vendor pool means shoppers have more choices across nearly every product category, Licardie said, allowing vendors to bring a wider assortment of specialty and unusual items.
