Paddle boats are already out on the lake by the time the market opens on Saturday, and families are spreading their blankets in the nearby shade. Grey smoke drifts across more than 70 stalls, carrying the smell of sizzling meat, and teenage girls chatter in Khmer while waiting for cups of fresh sugarcane juice. Hand-painted signs point the way to vendors from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, and tables sag under piles of fruit you won’t find in Chestnut Hill.

This is the Southeast Asian Market at FDR Park, tucked into a shaded stretch of green space on Meadow Lake in South Philadelphia. It’s just 20 minutes from Chestnut Hill, but it may as well be a world away.

Most of the vendors here are immigrants from Southeast Asia, and for many, this market is their chance to grow a business. Monica Leng has been running hers for 13 years. Her sons work the grill, and her mother-in-law makes change. Her stuffed chicken wings are the stall’s most popular dish, and business has been good enough that several years ago, she left the market to open a full-time restaurant. The restaurant was a success, she says, but it couldn’t compete with the rhythm and the ease of the market, where she clears just as much profit with much less work.

“In the end we decided to come back here. It’s a lot easier, only working the two days, and it’s also more fun.”

That didn’t happen by accident.

The market traces back roughly four decades, to a Laotian couple selling papaya salad out of a van. Word spread through Philadelphia’s Cambodian and Lao communities, refugees who’d settled in the city after fleeing war in Southeast Asia. Then more families joined in, cooking wherever they could find room: alleyways, street corners, and eventually the park itself.

For years, that meant dodging local enforcement. Vendors worked without permits, and confiscations weren’t rare.

“Prior to 2020, the market was a target by police in the city,” Sarun Chan, executive director of the FDR Southeast Asian Market, has said. Chan, along with the Cambodian Association of Philly and the Vending Association of FDR Park, helped change that, working with local police to establish the market as a legitimate, organized presence.

The market now has a board that helps vendors with things like business licensing and taxes. And what used to be an improvised, precarious operation has become one of the largest Southeast Asian food markets in the country, featured in national media like Food and Wine Magazine.

That recognition means the market’s pull now reaches well past South Philadelphia. Jennifer Shields drives in from Clifton, New Jersey. She found the market searching for something fun to do with her family, and it stuck.

“The Internet is a wonderful thing,” she says. “This is not our first time here, and it won’t be our last.”