Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (36 page)

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To be fair, the South Street Seaport Museum says that it is getting ready to open a much larger indoor installation of exhibits, any day—or year—now, which may considerably improve its curatorial profile.

Well, what's wrong with having an area just for tourists? you might ask.

The problem is that tourists travel long distances to observe daily life in a foreign setting, and then they are lured to a “festival marketplace” where all they see is T-shirt and taffy merchandising, of a sort the locals won't go near.

Were there an outdoor market with stalls, we could at least pretend that we were experiencing the same hurly-burly. But the Seaport Museum's founders were, from the start, less than happy with the Fulton Fish Market; they wanted its smelly, strenuous trade out of their midst, and will shortly be getting their wish. The Federal-style buildings that presently house the fish stalls will probably be redeveloped as expensive housing units, with a retail mix of Seaport Museum expansions and gentrified shops.

Perhaps the whole nature of honoring history through preservation and similar embalming devices should be reexamined. Isn't the true way of honoring the life of a historic district to make something happen in it that recaptures that vitality? For instance, in the South Street Seaport, instead of kicking out the Fulton Fish Market, they should be expanding it into a day-and-night affair, an open-air food market with covered stalls, such as the Markt in Vienna. What cities can't seem to do any more is create true bazaars that mix recreation and work, attracting all classes of strollers.
Those with disposable income will come to a street fair or flea market if there is sufficient density of urban spectacle, even if only to slum. This casual kasbah feeling used to be the genius of cities, something in their blood, but now it is almost impossible to design; and when shopping centers do go up in the heart of the city, they tend to be filled immediately with big-box stores, the easiest (because national chains will sign long leases) if dullest way to rent the space. By contrast, in Istanbul's covered bazaar, each shop was meant to support just one owner and his apprentice; merchants were not allowed to expand businesses into the next space: a radical idea, impractical in our society, but it makes for a lively parade of stalls.

Historically, public marketplaces were extraordinarily important to the New York waterfront, along both shores. Around 1650, on “market-day,” the city's inhabitants would wait on the strand at the East River shore to buy fish or animal skins from Indians in canoes, and produce from the Brooklyn and Long Island farmers. Later a succession of more permanent structures—Broadway Shambles, Custom-House Bridge Market, Old Slip Market, Coenties Slip Market, Fly Market, Exchange Market, Peck Slip Market, Catharine Market, Greenwich Market, and Washington Market—were built on or near the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, usually close to the ferries. For instance, the Old Slip Market developed because there were several large shady trees on the shore, near the end of Hanover Square and Old Slip, where country people coming from the Brooklyn ferry would stop and rest. The slaughterhouse butchers also prospered on the edge, though there were efforts to dislodge them, both because their activities were considered noxious and because they were in the habit of keeping bulldogs, who helped corral the cattle but also ran loose in the city, biting the local citizens. Thomas DeVoe, himself a butcher and an amateur historian who collected all the information he could about New York public markets into a fascinating, curious tome called
The Market Book
(1862), defended the early slaughterhouses: “They were public institutions—built and conducted for more than a century and a half by some of the first men of that day, several of whom have given their names to certain public streets, as Cortlandt, Beekman, Bayard, &c.; and withal, they are noted or marked down on many of the early maps of the City in the most prominent form; and if they are an eye-sore or an evil, they are a necessary one, where people will be carnivorous.”

Some of these waterfront markets had quite a healthy run, and became favorite subjects for guidebook writers. The talented reporter George G. Foster described in
New York by Gas-Light
(1850) the tumult of the West Side's Washington Market, which began in 1812 and grew into the coun-try's largest food market:

But we are here at Washington Market. What a squeeze—what a crowd! It is not here mere elbows and knees, and brawny chests and broad stout backs that you are to encounter. Now you stumble against a firkin, and now are overset by a bag. And there is a woman who has somehow—it is impossible to tell how—squeezed through between you and your next neighbor: but her basket, to which she clings with death-like tenacity, appears to be made of less elastic material than herself. It has assumed the position of a balloon, and forms a target for a score of noses pushed on from the rear. There is no chance of its coming through, that is certain; and the woman will
not
let go of it—that seems equally clear. There is nothing, therefore, for you to do but to crawl under it. As you are in the act of performing this difficult and delicate passage, a couple of salt mackerel, at the bottom of the basket, as if in sympathy for your sufferings, bedew your Leary with their briny tears, while a piece of corned-beef, with a large slice of the fat, lovingly reposes on your coat-collar. You at length regain your feet and ascertain that you have been kneeling in a basket of stale eggs, to the imminent ruin of your new black pants. The Irish huckster-woman who owns them, seeing this wholesale destruction of her brood of incipient chickens, pours out a volley of abuse upon your devoted dead, and loudly demands full compensation for her irreparable loss. You gladly pay whatever she requires; and by dint of pulling and squeezing, and being pulled and squeezed, we at length make our way through the lower walk, past the butter and cheese stands, and stalls for carcasses of dead hogs and sheep, now ankle-deep in mud, and so on to the fish-market.

At the end of the Civil War a separate wholesale section of the Washington Market was built a dozen blocks north of Vesey Street, on North Moore Street. In 1927 it was still going strong, when the English travel writer Stephen Graham described “the great market” in his book
New York Nights:
“It was two o'clock [A
.
M.], and New York here was very much alive. There were horse wagons and motor wagons, cases and baskets of vegetables and fruits, and porters innumerable hurrying hither and thither with gleaming white-wood boxes on their shoulders…. There were crates of greens stacked higher than men. There were cabinets of blackberries and raspberries. The nose whispered to the heart ‘Raspberries, raspberries’ as it tasted the air.”

The retail portion of the Washington Market was closed by the city in 1956, and the wholesale component lasted until 1967, when it was relocated (to Hunt's Point Market in the Bronx) to make way for Battery Park City. Today the only remnant of Manhattan's proud waterfront-market tradition is the Fulton Fish Market. A boisterous open market at the river's edge, such as some present-day stroller might just happen upon, would have to overcome the problem of the waterfront's isolation and remoteness. Most successful open markets in Europe and Asia are centrally located—they let you out at important, busy streets with public transportation on either end—whereas the Fulton Fish Market (in keeping with the evolution of the city's waterfront from beehive to isolated strip) is uninvitingly tucked under the highway, and deserted and boarded up in the daytime. Nevertheless, in full nighttime swing it remains as fascinating and as compelling as its companion, the South Street Seaport, is not.

AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, the Fulton Fish Market is lit up like a stadium night game. The lights, mounted high on lampposts and rooftops, render “day for night,” as they say on movie sets. The wholesale firms have unloaded and set out their wares in the post-midnight hours, and now the customers (mostly restaurants and retail fish stores) start arriving. For the next few hours it's like a performance piece, an elaborate opera about fish love. Approaching from the north end, through an ample parking lot that lies under the viaduct supporting the FDR Drive, you'd better look lively, because panel trucks, forklifts, and hand trucks bear down from all directions. Here, pedestrians don't have right of way; if you're just there to gape, you'll be dissonantly conspicuous in this symphony of purpose. Loaders, journeymen, salesmen, wholesalers, watchmen, inspectors,
bosses, filleters, everyone's got a function: the overall impression is that of old-fashioned, proletarian sweat, such as one had almost given up seeing on the streets of postmodernist New York.

A fish market has stood on this same site, between East River Piers 17 and 18, since 1834. It began as part of a larger, all-purpose market, open day and night, that sold everything from petticoats to books to hardware—to fish (its oysters enjoyed a worldwide reputation); but the market butchers pushed the fish stalls to a separate site across the way, claiming that its smells and wetness were a nuisance. The present Fulton Market spreads onto both sides of South Street: the smaller, more modest fish-sellers operate in cavelike stalls carved out of the ground floors of Federal-style brick buildings, while, across the street, on the river side, two tin-roofed sheds that constitute the Market Building house the larger wholesale firms. The 1930s art-deco-lettered Fulton Fish Market was built in the La Guardia era, and the Little Flower dedicated the building. The much older Tin Building, which dates from 1907, was burned down by a fire in 1996 (some say it was set vengefully by mobsters during the period of their extirpation), and replaced—despite strong misgivings the Giuliani administration had about the Fulton Fish Market—mainly because you couldn't leave a charred wreck facing the South Street Seaport, it was too unsightly and dangerous. It has been restored to a frontless, functional, breathtakingly unadorned state.

I meet up with Dave Pasternak, chef and co-owner of one of the city's best fish restaurants, Esca. I am not sure I would have had the nerve to explore the market in the wee hours without a guide. Dave, an athletic-looking man with a crewcut, is twitchy from both lack of sleep and foodie intensity.

“When do you sleep?” I ask him.

“Never. Sunday. Though this Sunday I'm supposed to go tuna fishing on Long Island.” Pasternak loves to fish. His fantasy is retiring from the restaurant business to indulge his hobby full-time.

Pasternak usually starts his rounds at David Samuels's Blue Ribbon Fish Company, one of the more established, respected firms, begun in 1931 by Samuels's grandfather. Traditionally the fish market has been the province of Italians and Jews, though in recent years Koreans have entered in numbers. Very few blacks find it a comfortable place to work.

“What do you got that's
stylish
?” Pasternak asks Samuels.

“We got some pretty good monkfish.” Samuels shows them to his customer. “I'll take a box,” says Pasternak, who starts to launch into a fishing story.

Samuels interrupts with an aside: “I have no idea what he's talking about. I never caught a fish in my life.” A nice moment: retailer detaching himself from the obsessions of his customers. Samuels, in his soiled white apron and jeans, looks a bit like Walter Matthau, and has some of that actor's rumpled world-weariness and humor. A third-generation fishmonger (though that term, with its “cockles and mussels” wheelbarrow associations, hardly seems applicable to a successful businessman who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut), he began working summers at the market on his sixteenth birthday. He says he was so innocent he didn't even curse. A dead body turned up that first day, and he thought, “Oh boy, this is going to be an experience.” No dead bodies have turned up since.

“Got any red snapper?” asks Pasternak.

“Come on, I'll show you. This is a ten. This is as good as it gets,” Samuels says, but with a trace of self-mockery. The two men seem to enjoy each other. Regular customers are crucial to the Fulton Fish Market, and it is equally important for buyers to establish close ties with wholesalers, because here everything is based on trust. “If he gives me bad fish,” Dave explains later, “he'd be hearing from me next day, so what's the point? He always tells me the truth.” Conversely, if a customer stiffed a wholesaler, he would never be sold to again. It's a closed world, a club, like the New York Stock Exchange, where one's word of honor means something. They even have a uniform: the men here are all dressed in knockabout
zhlub
(I'd been warned to do the same, and when I got home, I found fish scales stuck to my sleeve). Footwear consists of boots and old shoes, because the floor is one big puddle.

Watch your back, watch your back.
It's impossible to stand idly in one place for very long. “Excuse me!” a journeyman says, aggrieved, pushing a hand truck, coming through no matter what.

Without my having noticed, Samuels has faded from Pasternak's side. There's a protocol to this dealing: the facts of inventory emerge little by little. A circling, with very little eye contact; the pressure to buy is minimized that way, conversations break off easily, the customer wanders over
to another aisle, comparison-shopping, then back to the first. If anything, it seems a seller's market: the buyer has to keep pressing to get straight answers from stall operators. The old Italians who like to gab with each other are in no hurry to push their goods, as though sure the lot will be taken off their hands before daybreak. Maybe their customers have already put in phone orders. On the other hand, one hears a good deal of grousing about slow business. The prospect of both local teams, the Yankees and Mets, getting into the playoffs is aired pessimistically from a Fulton Fish Market perspective. “Restaurants'll be dead. Everybody'll be staying home, or in bars eating burgers and chicken wings.”

Dave is now over at the northern shed, where an Italian-American named Gino is holding forth. A man in his sixties, grizzled three-day growth, teeth missing, easily roused to volatility, which no one takes that seriously, Gino is offering slices of raw octopus to sample. I munch on one. It's good. I have the sense that I'm being watched, my manly mettle evaluated.