Every year like clockwork, the prettiest place on the planet is in, of all places, Detroit.

Nearly half of the Eastern Market is festooned with millions of blooms in every color imaginable, streaming from the walls in plush rivulets of scarlet red and lily white, forming knee-high Technicolor mazes of purchasable blossoms under the enormous roofs that house the farmers' markets, spilling out into the streets, rainbow streams on black asphalt. For half a century, the week after every Mother's Day, Flower Day—which Detroiters boast is the largest open-air flower show in the New World—has turned the market into the most dazzling city garden in America.

And then, the day after it's over, the colors recede, and the eternal greys and browns of a northern industrial city reassert themselves. The farmers' market, restaurants, and food wholesalers go back to selling produce, meat, and meals. Because, though the blooms have faded and the petals have fallen, the plant is still strong and the soil is still rich. And the Eastern Market is back to business as usual.

Detroit has had a public market since it was still barely more than a fur trading post of 500, but it wasn't until 1891 that the city's market was split into two, the Western and the Eastern, with the latter moved just south of a cemetery in the eastern part of the city. The Eastern Market grew by leaps and bounds, as the city did, and what had started as a single shed grew to the sprawling 32 acres the market encompasses today. The neighborhoods around the market grew as well—German and Italian neighborhoods bubbled up around it, their residents becoming integral parts of the market community as both merchants and buyers. Farmers and merchants even instituted days geared toward each group, selling produce and merchandise geared toward German families on one day, and pulling out an entirely different stock favored by Italian families the next. Down Gratiot, toward the Detroit River, the African-American community of Black Bottom flourished, drawing in musical luminaries such as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington, who leapt at the chance to play in clubs in one of America's most vibrant jazz scenes. The Eastern Market was where all these neighborhoods and more came together and shopped. It was where the city of Detroit learned how to eat.

"As we like to say, for the last 124 years, we nourished Detroit, to make it healthier, wealthier, and happier," says Dan Carmody, president of the Eastern Market Corporation, the nonprofit that's managed the market since 2006.

Jesse Green

In the 1950s, Eastern, like most public markets, began losing steam as supermarkets began their dominance of American grocery-shopping habits. By the 1980s, the Motor City's precipitous decline from engine of American industry to cautionary tale for city managers ( Don't let your municipality become the next Detroit! ) appeared increasingly irreversible. And the Eastern Market? It was reduced to little more than a line item for the city's anemic department of recreation.

"There were no evildoers involved," Carmody says. "It languished from lack of attention because it was one of 150 properties for a department with a rapidly diminishing budget."

But the Eastern Market, like Detroiters, hung in there. The market, locals said, was worth keeping alive.

"I grew up in the suburbs, and we never came down here except for sporting events. Except for this place," says Dave Mancini, owner and chef of Supino Pizza. "This was the one place everybody knew, that brought people around from the surrounding towns, the U of M folks."

He chuckles and adds, "I came here with my fourth-grade class on a field trip, and I still remember seeing the butchers with the long line of beef tongues—and being freaked out by it. But the market's an institution, one of the hallmark experiences, and it's always been that way."

And though it was a whole century later, the market still serves a vital purpose as the crossroads of all the variegated cultures and neighborhoods of Detroit.

"Our market is one of the few places where everybody across all walks of life, races, incomes come together, have a good time, and feel better for the experience," Carmody says.

Jesse Green

In the early 2000s, the city coordinated with various community task forces to come up with a revitalization plan to update facilities, broaden the market's appeal to consumers, recruit new vendors from farmers to restaurateurs to food wholesalers, and make for a cleaner and safer environment for customers and merchants. Since the Eastern Market Corporation took over the job, three of the market's five sheds have been overhauled to the tune of $16 million. Along with other infrastructure changes,the market's taken on the explicit mission of helping Detroiters in food deserts get better access to nutritious food, and helping children learn healthy eating habits.

"We have Detroit athletes here with Detroit schoolkids, telling them the virtues of eating vegetables if they want to grow up strong and play football for the Lions ," Carmody says.

Just as it ever has, food remains central to the market's mission. The market encourages small- to medium-sized retail and wholesale food businesses, and touts the city's convenient location on the Canadian border and its economical shipping routes to Europe.

"We've got a company that's made corned beef since 1874 and sells to Sam's Club and Walmart, there's another company that makes all the beef patties for all the Five Guys nationally, a guy who's been doing pickled herring for 50 years, gluten-free jam and jelly artisanal makers," Carmody says. "One of our biggest recent successes is McClure's Pickles, two guys who started pickling grandma's recipes, now in a former auto-parts facility with 35 employees."

At the same time, the market still wants to feed Detroit.

"We'll never be just exotic food for high prices," Carmody says. "We've expanded the smorgasbord, but affordable food is just as much a part of our agenda as the people who want the most exotic mushrooms."

To that end, the market participates in matching program for food stamps used to buy from Michigan food producers—which benefits specialty food merchants like Carolyn Leadley, of Rising Pheasant Farms, known for the sunflower shoots it supplies for the salads of some of the Detroit's most acclaimed restaurants. Leadley and her husband are familiar faces at the Eastern Market's farmers' market.

"We have people more willing to try our shoots because of that added income," she says.

With 30 food companies recently added, the market now has some 600-food based vendors, 450 of whom are wholesale. There are more ambitious changes planned for the future, including expanding to as many as 400 acres of nearby abandoned lots, creating separate zones for food wholesalers, and emphasizing retail in the 12-acre market core. But it'll remain strictly Detroit, Carmody promises: "We're not blessed with Pike Place's million-dollar views, but we're still a very authentic market, where people come to not to buy tourist trinkets and t-shirts, but to buy their food and eat well."