Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (37 page)

“Bet you never ate octopus at four in the morning,” he says to me.

“You're right about that.”

Dave needs sea urchins, and he's trying to coax Gino. For a good customer, there is often “something in back” when the supply seems exhausted in front.

“Come on, give me half a box.”

“I can't, I promised it to the other guy.”

“So tell him half for me, half for him.”

No dice. This time Gino really has no more sea urchins, in back or front. Also, there's very little shellfish tonight: “The truck broke down in Long Island.” I get a vision of an eighteen-wheeler pulling off the Sunset Highway, grounded till morning.

It's a male environment, with the exception of several middle-aged Asian women buyers. Samuels's handsome cousin struts around with a halibut held priapically at his fly. “Hey, don't hurt anybody with that thing,” a co-worker yells. Pasternak turns to me and explains, “All these guys are related.” Fathers pass the job down to sons, with very little mobility from one generation to the next; workers stay workers, and bosses, bosses. Nicknames abound, there's an atmosphere of camaraderie, based partly, I would imagine, on the sharing of tough working conditions: night
hours, outside in all weathers, doused by fish water, dodging seagull droppings, digging one's hands into ice. Those who work in the fish market are prone to rheumatism, arthritis, heart trouble, cancer, and a shorter lifespan. These are men for whom family comes first, but their crew is like a second family. When the Organized Crime Control Bureau investigated the fish market for shylocking, extortion, income tax evasion, and “tapping” (the practice of swiping a few fish out of the box), they were frustrated by a wall of silence. Though the mob seems mostly cleaned out, or submerged, there are still knots of men standing around affecting a wiseguy swagger. “If he owes you money, go and get it,” one says to the other, with an ominous wink. “Go and
get
it.”

I am introduced to an affable, beefy Italian guy with an enormous chest and spindly legs. “This guy used to be an enforcer.”

“Get outta here,” the man says modestly.

“He used to collect checks.”

“If I can't get a Czech, I'll take a Polack.”

A coffee wagon in the middle of the shed dispenses caffeine and crullers. I notice a little recreational area along the river's edge, Peck Slip, where a few workmen are taking a cigarette-and-coffee break. This sliver of park has benches and informational plaques that say ships used to tie up here, and warehouses received their goods. All that are left of those days are some souvenir iron bollards waiting for mooring ropes that will never come again.

Pasternak points out a young, athletic-looking Korean stall-owner, who is climbing over his stock, looking for the moment more eager to unpack crates than to sell, moving emptied boxes out of the way with a grappling hook. “See that guy? He's big. He's the one who first brought in white salmon.” Nowadays there are many more imports; fish is flown in from all over the world—yellowfin tuna and mahi-mahi from Fiji and Hawaii, halibut from the West Coast, exotic species from the Caribbean—thanks in part to Styrofoam, inexpensive, lightweight insulation that has made air freight more attractive. Fifty years ago, New Yorkers used to eat little more than flounder, codfish, and shrimp, but their tastes have grown more adventurous and cosmopolitan, keeping in step with the city's changing demographics. Philippine, Thai, Korean, West Indian, Dominican, Haitian, and Indian cuisines have all widened the New York fish-eater's
palate, just as Japanese sushi taught people to appreciate the once-disdained tuna. Fish also has to be much fresher now, as the nouvelle-cuisine methods of preparing it have edged toward medium-rare, and the clientele has grown more demanding.

I am following Pasternak, trying to ascertain his principles of choice. He sniffs a bluefish here, pokes a mackerel there. “What are you looking for?” I ask.

“If it's stiff,” he says, as if the answer were self-evident. Clear eyes and blood-red sacs are also signs of freshness. “With tuna, it's all in the color or the fat.”

He bumps into an old buddy, a Montauk fisherman, and they exchange info. On the one hand, the buyers and sellers live for fish. They're like enthusiasts at a comic book convention: they'll talk about different species by the hour, how to catch this, how to prepare that. (“Whiting is great for frying up. A little tartar sauce on the side—mhm!”) On the other hand, there's a nonchalance bordering on disrespect. Filleters, master craftsmen in their art, who carve with precision up to twenty-five hundred pounds of fish in a night, dribble cigarette ash with one hand, slicing and boning with the other. One guy drags a decapitated swordfish along the ground, not even bothering to lift it. Why should I? he seems to be saying. Dead is dead.

It's a little different, I think, at a fish market where they still bring the product in by boat. One of the greatest urban spectacles a city can offer is a really jumping fish market: I saw one such example in Pusan, South Korea, with the fishing boats moored just outside the stalls, and their wooden crates stacked onto the pier, wriggling with live critters, and the dockside restaurants where you point to your dinner, still swimming in the tanks. Fulton Fish Market used to be thick with sailing vessels: twenty or thirty smacks, sloops, and schooners discharging their cargoes at once, and live fish stored in the East River in slatted boxes that floated behind the building. But fish stopped arriving by water in the early 1970s, partly because New York Harbor was too polluted to supply a local catch (or store it in the river, once caught), partly because it was less labor-intensive to load the fish onto refrigerated trucks in New Bedford, Baltimore, Canada, and Florida.

Thursday morning is the busiest selling day at Fulton Market, because
the restaurants stock up in advance for the weekends. A buyer for the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar—round cheeks, professorial glasses, spotless white apron—chats with Pasternak at the Blue Ribbon stalls, talking about fish prices and one of their competitors, who can afford to spend outrageous amounts for the most exotic types. Pasternak says gloomily, “People don't understand that quality fish costs
us,
too.”

Pasternak does a quick tour around the stalls on the east side of the street. (Here the firms tend to be smaller, and the fish cheaper and more commonplace.) Everything he has bought so far gets shipped to one stall and taken away from there in a truck. I'm still dodging crowds, wherever I look there seems to be activity, but my guide apologizes: “Tonight the market's slow. The weather was lousy earlier in the week, and the boats didn't go out, so there's less product than usual.”

I have been told by old-timers that there used to be a lot more fish, quantitatively speaking, in the market. The number of firms has shrunk from 187 a few decades ago to 50 today. I ask David Samuels if he thinks fish markets themselves are an endangered species.

“Fresh fish is something that has to be purchased by eye,” Samuels answers. “There'll always be a need for a wholesale fish market.” And the Fulton Fish Market remains one of the largest wholesale fish markets in the world.

That doesn't mean it will always be in Lower Manhattan. Somehow the fact that the fish gets motored in makes the present Fulton Fish Market seem vaguely arbitrary; I mean if it's just a truck depot, it doesn't have to be on the water anymore. It could be anywhere, even Hunt's Point on the Bronx waterfront, where a produce and meat market already exist, and where a string of mayors since the 1970s have been pushing to relocate the reluctant fishmongers to a bigger, “state of the art” fish market. During his mayoral administration, Rudolph Giuliani was especially adamant about moving the market to the Bronx, perhaps because he had made his earlier reputation as a prosecutor by promising to rid the Fulton Fish Market of organized crime, and retained his distaste for the milieu. City officials justify the move by saying that federal health regulations prohibit selling fish outdoors and require that it be refrigerated at the point of sale. The fishmongers who want to stay in the Fulton Market insist that they can get around that problem.

Those, like myself, who love the old market where it is, say it's about preserving a piece of living history, and keeping it in an accessible part of the city (close to Chinatown as well), so that even civilians can drop in and buy a dozen fish for a party, while veterans can continue doing business where they and their families have for generations. With all the forced, artificial connections that are being foisted on the New York waterfront in its twenty-first-century transformation, a fish market on the river's edge continues to feel like the most appropriate of functions.

I used to come down to the market in my early twenties, mostly to eat at a great fish restaurant named Sweets, on the corner of South Street and Fulton. It was upstairs on the second floor, and had sawdust on the planks, and the slanted look of a ship galley out of Melville's time, and it wasn't even pricey but quite reasonable, and you could get a piece of fish grilled to your liking with a minimum of fuss or sauce, and the old black waiter didn't treat me like an impostor, though I felt like one, an aspiring writer pretending to be as worldly as the bankers in gray flannel suits at the next table. Most of the legendary eateries—Sloppy Louie's, Dirty Ernie's, Sweets, the Paris Bar—are gone (the Paris Café presently on South Street is a parvenu establishment that appropriated the name); and the suburban-type restaurants of South Street Seaport have little connection with the market adjoining it. For the moment, the Seaport and the Fulton Fish Market coexist pragmatically if uneasily; the refrigerated trucks are gone and the streets washed down if not cleaned by 10:00 A
.
M. in time for the parking lot to be filled by the Seaport's tourist and white-collar clientele.

At six-thirty in the morning, when the market is starting to wind down, I go around the corner to the Market Grill on 40 Peck Slip, which is open all night, and serves omelets with fried potatoes and other breakfast staples. Fish does not seem particularly featured on the menu, though that may come as a relief to the market workers who frequent it. The TV is on to CNN, the waitress is talking sports with one of her regulars, and a group of Koreans hang around the back tables, laughing.

As I leave, I pause to take in a last whiff of the fish market. Joseph Mitchell, tireless habitué of these streets and stalls, once tried to pin down that “heady, blood-quickening, sensual smell.” He found it to be a mixture of the harbor, the oyster houses, tar, smoke from the fish-curing lofts, wet boat nets, the coffee-roasting plants on Front Street, a spice mill, and the
tannery district to the north. Gone are the coffee-roasting plants and the tannery district and the spice mill, and the boats themselves; but you can still be brought up short by the ripe pungency of the Fulton Fish Market and the brackish East River, now augmented by the burnt-rubber tire smell of the FDR Drive, and the starched odor of fax paper and modems from nearby brokerage houses.

Fish are the most transitory of human delights, next to cherry blossoms. If a week-old newspaper's prose is said to be good for nothing but wrapping fish, the week-old haddock claims not even that utility. As the commodity is perishable, so is the venue. The Fulton Market, the last fish market of a city in the Western world that is still on its original site, hangs on, vibrant, raunchy, but under siege. My prediction is that in a year or two it will be gone. So maybe you had better get over there some 4:00 A
.
M. and see it and smell it for yourself, before it turns into another page of
Lost New York.

18 EXCURSUS THE ELUSIVE JOSEPH MITCHELL

N
O ONE WROTE MORE PASSIONATELY OR INTIMATELY OR WELL ABOUT THE NEW YORK WATERFRONT THAN JOSEPH MITCHELL
.
WHEN I FIRST BEGAN TELLING people I was working on a book on the same subject, many would get misty-eyed and ask me if I had read
The Bottom of the Harbor
(which of course I had), with the clear implication that he'd already done the job. Joseph Mitchell became a tiger in my path, the patriarch I would first have to slay. Some part of me began to dislike Joseph Mitchell. Well, “dislike” is too strong a word; I itched to disparage him, the only problem being that he was such a good writer. I adored a number of his essays, such as
“Up in the Old Hotel,” “Mr. Hunter's Grave,” “The Cave Dwellers,” “The Rats on the Waterfront,” and “Joe Gould's Secret.” Still, I'd never been a total Mitchell fan; the long technical passages about catching and cooking fish bored me, I could not sign on to the romance of the saloon, and the quaint old geezers sitting around the fish market gabbing in the “Old Mr. Flood” stories did not do it for me.

Perhaps what put me off Mitchell most was that he exemplified a certain objective-sounding, reticent ideal of nonfiction prose that many educated people respect the most, but that seemed the opposite of the kind I practiced, the personal essay, which dramatically foregrounds the contradictions of a subjective outlook. Mitchell was a first-rate reporter, and he would go forth and hang out and bring back an impeccably researched study of some unsung character or way of life, written in that unobtrusive, fact-filled, clarity-and-precision style advocated by Strunk and White, and filtered through the narrative voice of a non-egotistical first-person singular. Oh, occasionally Mitchell would permit glimpses of himself to peep through his profiles, but they conveyed mostly a generalized-observer sensibility, rather than the particulars of one man's experiences and struggles with his self. Even as I was entertained and moved by his pieces, I felt frustrated by the hide-and-seek, watery aspect of Mitchell's persona.