As you head south on Hempstead Highway from 11th Street — following a route German farmers once took to bring their harvest from Spring Branch to the farmers market held where Market Square Park now stands — you pass rust-dappled, slightly overgrown industrial buildings and a few new townhouse developments rising from the roughened coastal prairie.

As the cracked concrete narrows and curves under a railway bridge, a large iron skeleton of what could be a new warehouse stands almost majestically on a rise overlooking the highway.

This is the site of the recently announced Railway Heights Market, a planned 25,000-square-foot food and retail destination that will also include a 13,000-square-foot beer garden with a stage for live music, a half acre of greenspace, 15,000 square feet of coworking space and, eventually, a 600-car automatic parking garage.

Scheduled to open in 2019, Railway Heights follows four high-end food halls coming downtown and the announced redevelopment of the market on Airline, which is usually referred to as Canino's.

LISTEN: Will the Heights farmers market get 'hipsterized?'

Houston is a big city, and there is room for this and similar projects to be successful. I hope they are, and I hope they reflect the unique nature of Houston and aren't Whole Foods with stalls. But it's worth thinking through the city's history of local food and the specifics of the site so that Railway Heights avoids becoming another gimmicky development that uses meaningful words like "local" as a marketing ploy.

Can Houston support another food-related development, one that is not centrally located and accessible only by car?

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ON A 100-degree afternoon, I met Anh Mai and Shepard Ross. Mai is managing partner of Railway Heights as well as downtown developments Conservatory, Bravery Chef Hall and Prohibition Supperclub & Bar. Ross, a longtime restaurateur, is Mai's partner in this project and Bravery Chef Hall.

We stood on the second floor of the warehouse overlooking what will become a kid-friendly park, dog run and weekend farmers market. Though the gutted warehouse, which once housed a rug store and an interior design studio, is surrounded by scraggly grass and hard-packed clay, the two have a clear vision. The project will include 40 to 50 stalls — 20 will be restaurants located primarily on the second floor. They will share a common eating area and be joined by a wine bar.

Mai and Ross plan on working with locally owned mom-and-pops and first- and second-time restaurateurs who reflect Houston's diversity: "Viet-Cajun crawfish, Polish and German food, Mexican, and more," Mai said. Ross added that they won't be including chains like Chipotle or Marble Slab.

They will taste-test each vendor and plan on making the vendor economics work by offering compact, well-designed stalls that will keep start-up costs much less than those of a food truck. They envision using their experience at Conservatory and Bravery Chef Hall to create an incubator for new chefs and restaurants.

The retail side of the project will include a flexible mix of clothing, gifts, maybe cookbooks and, what might be most interesting, a first-floor "grocery store" that will consist of bakers, cheesemongers, vendors selling locally grown produce, butchers, etc., each operating as separate businesses. They also plan on hosting a farmers market on Saturdays and Sundays with the traffic from the other onsite businesses driving customers to the farmers.

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WITH THE industrial history of the site, Railway Heights has the potential to be like Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, which opened in 1893, when the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad incorporated existing butchers and farmers markets into its new station building.

When I lived in the greater Philadelphia area, I loved visiting and enjoying crab cakes, pretzels and Philly cheesesteaks while buying produce from Amish farmers and browsing cookbooks and cookware.

When I first moved to Houston, I longed for something similar. Since then, I've learned that Houston, throughout its history, has had spaces that served similar purposes. From 1841 to 1939, the City Hall Market House, which occupied downtown's Market Square, housed the seat of local government on the second floor while the first floor was divided into stalls occupied by butchers, fishmongers, grocers and produce sellers.

Until 1929, the Market Square curbsides also hosted a Saturday farmers market. In 1929, the farmers market moved to a 114,583-square-foot space with 290 covered stalls for farmers, a restaurant and parking for 500 cars. It was open six days a week. But as area farms turned into suburbs and consumers turned to supermarkets, the farmers market closed in 1957.

Since then, similar concentrations of foods and services have popped up throughout the greater Houston area. Flea markets, like Sunny Flea Market between Loop 610 and Beltway 8, have combined retail, food, restaurants and even children's entertainment to provide affordable goods to Houston's Latino population. The Airline Drive market evolved to do the same with produce and Mexcian specialty foods.

Houston's strip centers have become one of the most important and widespread of these concentrations. Strip centers on the east side of the Hillcroft and Harwin intersection in the Mahatma Gandhi District include grocery stores, restaurants and clothing stores that cater to Houston's South Asian population.

The strip centers in the 9800 and 9900 blocks of Bellaire Boulevard, just east of Beltway 8, might well contain one of the highest concentration of food establishments in the country and is arguably one of the city's and country's best food blocks. Sterling Plaza on the north side of Bellaire, anchored by H Mart, a Korean grocery chain, features Chengdu Taste, Uyghur Bistro and other great restaurants.

Across Bellaire, you can take a culinary tour of East Asia at Dun Huang Plaza, sampling cuisines from Korea, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and various regions of China.

READ MORE: The history of Houston food

Though these various dense clusters of food and retail have different leasing and business models, they each developed and adapted to serve the needs of their surrounding communities. They are, in some ways, organic. The centrally located Reading Terminal Market has also evolved to fit Philadelphia's culture and urban landscape and is accessible to public transportation. They provided customers with centralized, convenient, one-stop shopping (especially in the days before supermarkets and cars) and social gathering places. They provided business with more affordable spaces by sharing the costs of amenities and access to more potential customers than they could attract on their own.

After many years in Houston, though, I've become less convinced a project like Reading Terminal fits the decentralized, polycultural sprawl of Houston. The well-appointed strip center that reflects a particular neighborhood's diversity now seems like a much better fit for the Bayou City.

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BUT THAT doesn't mean there isn't space here for Railway Heights. Already, the development has differentiated itself from many others and the new wave of food halls with its stated interest in selling locally raised produce and meats and hosting a farmers market. (Though it does seem similar to the redevelopment of the Airline Drive market, which would be just six miles away.)

There are some concerns. Starting, and more importantly maintaining, a successful new farmers market is more difficult than it looks. I'm all for more farmers markets. But I've seen too many attempts come and go. Too often, it's not about the market, but marketing the project.

A successful farmers market takes a long-term commitment to local agriculture, educating new farmers, educating customers, building infrastructure and more. And farms and farmers just don't sprout from fields when a new market is announced. If every developer and development that says they want a farmers market invested in a few farms and provided land to farmers at affordable rates and with long-term leases, they might have more success.

The Houston-area has at least one such successful development in the partnership between Loam Agronomics and Johnson Development's Harvest Green, a master-planned suburban community in Fort Bend County that has made local agriculture a central feature.

So far, Railway Heights seems to be off to a good start with its proposed onsite container farm/salad bar/vending machine concept. But it will take more than a shipping container of hydroponic lettuce to develop a thriving local food economy.

And downtown, where those food halls will be — Lyric Market, Finn Hall, the market at Capitol Tower and Bravery Chef Hall will join Conservatory— concentrated dining makes sense. With strong demand generated by several new apartment buildings opening and a dearth of good lunch options, leaving workers to wander dank tunnels in search of unwilted salads and nonrubbery tortillas, these new food halls should be successful.

But I am already concerned that they will have problems finding enough quality chefs and vendors. And we are adding 20 new restaurants to that at Railway Heights?

Still, Mai and Ross bring their considerable experience navigating Houston's complex food scene. Mai began his career in food while growing up in the Dickinson area, where his mom grew unique Vietnamese vegetables like rau ram in her garden that he would then sell to local restaurants and grocery stores — showing an entrepreneurial spirit he has nurtured over the years and that he brings to this project, which began before the soon-to-open Bravery Chef Hall and came to fruition after he and his partners approached a Chicago-based parking company to join the project as the overall developer.

Mai and Ross admit that the site's location offers some challenges, but they point out that it's easily accessible from two freeways and close to Memorial Park, and new residential developments are coming to the area.

The transitional, industrial nature of an area that doesn't have much well-established residential or retail development helps it avoid the gentrification pitfalls of other projects — and it also meant that this was one of the few relatively inexpensive swaths of inner-loop property big enough for such an ambitious project, lower costs they can pass on to vendors.

Those lower costs combined with an odd industrial site that is more representative of Houston than a mixed-use apartment complex on Kirby, years of restaurant experience and a history of Vietnamese rau ram growing on a bayou-washed Gulf Coast prairie just might give Houston its own Reading Terminal — or, better yet, a version of the old City Hall Market House that fits our sprawling city.

David Leftwich is a writer based in Houston. He is the author of the poetry chapbook The City, which was published by Little Red Leaves Textile Series.

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