Cross Derby Square on a Thursday afternoon this month and four centuries sit within a few minutes' walk of each other. Vendors are setting up tables in a market that traces back to 1634. Nearby, an 1818 bank building is pouring wine instead of holding deposits. A former department store on Essex Street is running the only rooftop bar downtown Salem has ever had. And on Washington Street, a restaurant that recently closed is already being fitted for a new name and a new menu.
None of that reads as history from a distance. It reads as this week's schedule. The oldest buildings in downtown Salem aren't being preserved as much as they're being worked, and the pace of that reuse this year is worth paying attention to if you live anywhere near Essex or Washington Street.
A market older than the country, and this year it knows it
The Salem Farmers' Market sets up in Derby Square every Thursday from 3 to 7 p.m. through October 8. The market's roots go back to 1634, though the version running today, organized by the nonprofit Salem Main Streets, is in its 18th season, drawing about 25 vendors and an average of more than 2,000 shoppers on a given Thursday.
What's different this year is what the market chose to put on its own poster. In recognition of Salem's 400+ commemoration, this year's design highlights precolonial food traditions tied to Naumkeag, the Indigenous community that predates the city itself. The team behind Mack Park Farm, the city's municipal food farm, worked with Thomas Green of the Massachusett Tribe to identify crop varieties that may have been grown or traded here long before the market's own 1634 start date, including Boston Marrow Squash, Yellow Crookneck Squash, Otto File Flint Corn, and Succotash Beans. A market that's already nearly four hundred years old is using this season to point even further back.
The festival's last day lands on market day
Derby Square is doing double duty this summer. The Salem Arts Festival launched the season there with a Juried Art Gallery opening, live performances, a grazing table from Bambolina, and a mocktail bar from EDEX Provisions, and according to Destination Salem's event calendar, the festival's run closes out on August 20.
Check a calendar and that closing date falls on a Thursday, the market's regular day. Anyone who shows up to Derby Square that week gets both the last afternoon of the festival and the standing farmers market in the same square, at the same time, without having to choose. It's a small scheduling coincidence, but it's the kind of thing you only notice if you're paying attention to the square week to week rather than glancing at it once a year.
An 1818 bank and a recently closed space, same street
Washington Street is where the real turnover is happening this year, and it's happening at opposite ends of the tenure spectrum.
At 125 Washington Street, Ledger has been serving dinner inside the old Salem Savings Bank building, constructed in 1818, since chef Matt O'Neil opened it in June 2017. Boston Magazine's first look at the space described a dining room built around the bank's original architecture: the vault door repurposed as a wine room entrance, safety deposit boxes turned into a dividing wall, and a 30-seat bar set against the old teller windows. Executive chef Daniel Gursha earned a 2022 James Beard Foundation nomination for Best Chef Northeast while running that kitchen. Nine years in, Ledger is still the address people mean when they say they're eating out downtown.
Farther down Washington Street, at number 189, a very different story is unfolding. According to Boston Restaurant Talk, Neighborhood Tavern, a dining and drinking spot expanding out of Northborough, is opening a Salem location in the space that had been home to The Derby Restaurant & Bar. The new menu leans toward the familiar: fried pickles, wings, nachos, burgers, steak tips, fish and chips, roasted chicken, tacos, and mac and cheese, alongside beer, wine, and cocktails. It's a straightforward concept moving into a recently vacated space, on the same street where a 200-year-old bank building has held one restaurant tenant for nine years running.
Here's what that stretch of downtown looks like when you line the buildings up side by side.
| Location | Original use | This year |
|---|---|---|
| Derby Square | Open-air trading ground since 1634 | 18th season of the organized farmers market, plus the Salem Arts Festival through August 20 |
| 125 Washington Street | Salem Savings Bank, built 1818 | Ledger, dining in the old vault and teller windows since 2017 |
| 189 Washington Street | Former home of The Derby Restaurant & Bar | Neighborhood Tavern, announced in 2026 |
| 209 Essex Street | Newmark's department store | The Hotel Salem, with Counter and rooftop bar The Roof |
The department store's roof is the only one in town
That last row is worth its own stop. The Hotel Salem, a 44-room boutique property at 209 Essex Street on the pedestrian mall, sits inside what used to be Newmark's department store. On the ground floor, Counter runs an open-concept kitchen with seating for 50 and a seasonal patio for 30, styled after the lunch counters that anchored department stores like Newmark's in the 1950s and '60s.
Upstairs, The Roof is open for the 2026 season, and it remains the only rooftop bar in downtown Salem. That's not a marketing line so much as a simple fact about the skyline here: for a downtown with dozens of restaurants packed into a few walkable blocks, there is exactly one place to get a drink above street level, and it only exists because a mid-century retail building got a second life.
What this actually tells you about the neighborhood
None of this is nostalgia dressed up as charm. A market reaching back before its own four-century history to source colonial-era crop varieties, a bank building that's held one restaurant tenant for going on a decade while the space next door just turned over, and a department store's rooftop becoming the only one of its kind in the district: that's a downtown actively deciding what its old buildings are for right now, not just protecting what they used to be.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you live near Derby Square and want to know what's changing before it shows up on a map, that instinct is worth trusting. Michael Selbst spends as much time watching which buildings in Salem change hands and change purpose as he does watching what they sell for, because the two are rarely unrelated. If you're curious what any of this means for a property you already own downtown, or you're weighing whether now's the moment to make a move here, reach out and schedule a consultation.
