Some farmers at Seattle’s Pike Place Market wanted Joe Desimone thrown out. His prices were too competitive, they argued. In 1927, the manager answered their complaints: that was no reason to expel him.

Giuseppe "Joe" Desimone was a hard man to miss over six feet tall, roughly 300 pounds, remembered in local history as an extrovert. He arrived in America in 1897 as a stowaway from Naples. In Seattle, he worked for another Italian-American family, the Vaccas; it was there that he met and married their daughter Assunta. Together they started leasing farmland, then began buying it, draining swampland along the Duwamish River into productive fields.

In 1915, Joe bought two Model T trucks and started delivering produce to groceries, hotels and restaurants. Another grower, Rafael Vacca, remembered his uncle having ten or twenty boxes of spinach. Joe had 500. During celery season, Vacca recalled, Desimone took in $40,000 in forty days. “Joe Desimone, he was the king”.

He could not stop, rapidly building a business well beyond his market stall. Joe, Assunta and their five children put their earnings into more land and shares in the company that owned the market. By the time farmers demanded his removal, he was already its Vice President.

During the Depression, manager Arthur Goodwin’s finances weakened while Joe kept acquiring shares. By 1941, Goodwin sold him his remaining stake. The former farmhand now controlled the buildings where he had once brought his vegetables to sell.

As an owner, Joe ran the properties like a family business. He was accessible and helped fellow Italians and other newcomers get started. He kept rents low, partly by postponing repairs.

When he died in 1946, his family’s ownership continued on until the city bought its holdings in 1974. Joe’s name remains on the Desimone Bridge above Western Avenue, where vendors rent stalls to sell their handmade goods. A reminder for others trying to make a living at Pike Place, of the vegetable seller who became their landlord and helped them stay.