Quote:
Originally Posted by Velvet_Highground
I’m sure most people have heard of Battle Creek’s Moniker Cereal City but has anyone ever heard of Kalamazoo’s Celery City? Apparently Kalamazoo was THE world center of celery production popularizing and producing the vegetable into what we know it as today. Michigan is the nations #2 celery producer behind California. I was going to post a video from Restless Viking about Arcadia Creek but somehow I clicked on a video about celery and found it interesting.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nFy4Q_BAbv8
A walk down Arcadia Creek and its history. Gotta hand it to
the man Restless Viking finds and makes niche history interesting.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dtNCcAhFirs |
Neat videos - thanks for sharing.
Yeah, the Celery City moniker doesn't really make any sense in the collective conscience anymore, though I do still see reference to it from time to time, but really only on the micro-local level.
Watching that first video reminded me of this "classic" Portlandia Sketch:
• Video Link
Other "nicknames" that Kalamazoo has held through time, to varying degrees of popularity:
- Bedding plant capital of the world*
- Paper City (for it's one-time abundance of paper manufacturing, which there is still a hint of)
- Mall City (for its claim of having the first outdoor pedestrian mall in the country)
- Beer City / Beer Town (along with hundreds of other cities these days)
- The Zoo (and other variants, like KZoo, K'zoo, Kazoo, etc.)
- Windmill City (another antiquated manufacturing industry)
- Debt-Free City (only city in the country of 50,000+ to have its debts paid during the Great Depression)
- Weed City (for the over-abundance of pot shops)
*Pretty wordy and not-at-all sexy, but Kalamazoo County produces the most bedding plants in Michigan and around 75% of all bedding plants in the country.