In 2020 and early 2021, the Peale participated in the Lexington Market Public History Initiative in an effort to collect stories and memories about the world-famous Lexington Market as the market itself prepared for a redesign and reopening. The initiative’s core partners were Baltimore Heritage, Baltimore Public Markets Corporation, Lexington Market, Inc., Market Center Community Development Corporation, Seawall, and the Peale, and the work was partially enabled by a Pathways Grant from the Maryland Center for History and Culture. The Lexington Market Public History Initiative was financed in part by the Maryland Center for History and Culture’s Thomas V. “Mike” Miller History Fund. This story was recorded by Adam Droneburg, Dan Goodrich, Nicole King and others of the Baltimore Sound Society for an earlier project.

Nancy Faidley Divine (00:01): I'm Nancy Faidley Divine. Faidley's was started in 1886 by my grandfather. It was primarily all fish. It was an outside market at that timeframe. He sold all kinds of fresh seafood and game. It was a very active and busy market because there weren't any grocery stores at that timeframe. So everybody came to the market to buy their food.

Nancy Faidley Divine: But my father started fixing himself on a little hot plate fish sandwiches, and everybody would come up to him and tell him how good it smelled and would he make them one? So my dad then, saw a need to open the cooked food section and that's when Faidley's first started with all cooked foods. So this place was primarily just set up for just fish, this room that you see, out of the whole market. There wasn't supposed to be fish down in the other part of the market. They were keeping it up into one section, but nobody else came back. So eventually my dad and my husband moved and built the whole thing up. That's when the raw bar came about and we had the cooked food then. So that's why it looks like it does today.

Nancy Faidley Divine: In the latter part of the '80s, I decided I wanted to try a gourmet crab cake because no one had ever made it. Everybody had crab cakes, but they didn't make it out of the jumbo lump because the jumbo lump was the most expensive meat. I started making them and I made them the size and I made them round because that's exactly how it fit in my hands to make them. That's why that crab cake is that size. It's the size of my hands. I started making them and I only made six because I thought, hm, people aren't going to pay this price that I got to ask and then stand up and eat. But I was wrong. They'll pay for something if it was really good.

Nancy Faidley Divine: So in 1992, that crab cake got the Golden Dish Award from GQ Magazine as one of the top 10 dishes in the country. So then other restaurants, other magazine journalists, food editors started hearing about it more and more. So that's when it started to become really famous. That's when I noticed in restaurants, they were copying the shape and making my into a ball rather than a patty, because for years you'd get two patties and you get two crab cakes on a plate and they would be two small patties. But I didn't make it that way because the lumps were so big, I wanted to keep the lumps solid and keep them. And so the only way I could do was to make that round ball rather than flatten it out and break the crab meat up. So I didn't do it flat. I made it round, but other people started making it round too.

Nancy Faidley Divine: Most of the crab cakes I see now in magazines and articles have the round shape that I started in the 1980s. Those crab cakes come pretty famous, and Faidley's has become pretty famous all over the world.

Asset ID: 9154

Transcription abbreviated: Contact the Peale for a complete transcript.

Photo of Lexington Market, ca. 1903, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print