Eat the City(29)
Changing the system to remove the animals, contain the slaughterhouses, and find other ways of delivering fresh meat to cities took hundreds of years. As recently as the late 1950s, cows, pigs, and sheep were still walking through Midtown Manhattan streets en route to massive slaughterhouses. Even now, some of the eighty local live poultry houses also dispatch goats, lambs, and even cows, serving immigrants who expect to look into a living animal’s eyes, feel its flesh, and know it’s fresh before killing it to eat. An uncountable number of animals are still raised for food in backyards, basements, community gardens, and city streets.
FROM the very start, newcomers remarked on the plentiful meat they found in this wild land. The Dutch in Manhattan ate buffalo, raccoon, beaver, wild rabbit, turkey, and deer. A traveler from Holland visiting Nieuw Amsterdam supped on a roasted haunch of venison, bought from Indian hunters. “The meat was exceedingly tender and good, and also quite fat,” he wrote, and the turkey and goose were also tasty. The remarkable thing, the traveler wrote, was that “everything we had was the natural production of the country.”
Soon after the Dutch settlers arrived in 1624, so did three ships called the Horse, the Sheep, and the Cow, named for their cargo. On the journey across the ocean, each animal had its own stall with three feet of sand on the floor, and an attendant who received a bonus if the beast arrived alive. The imported livestock, generally left free to roam, trampled the fields of the native Lenape people, who retaliated. The massacre of swine belonging to a major landowner on Staten Island launched what became known as the Pig War. Cows, horses, oxen, and hogs were eventually exiled to winter on Coney Island, back when it was actually an island. Its watery borders served to pen in the animals, who grazed the wild grasses with nowhere to go except to their own eventual slaughter.
Yet a century and a half later, New York was a blooming, fetid city of animals, where market shoppers had to navigate “the heads of sheep, lambs &c., the hoofs of Cattle, blood and offal strewed in the gutters and sometimes on the pavement, dead dogs, cats, rats, and hogs.” Poor women kept their goats tethered to posts and allowed their pigs to forage in the streets. Rich ladies and dandies were disgusted. As New York continued its ascent to national preeminence, concerns mounted about the animals in the streets. The city’s health inspectors struggled to edge species by species out of public view and establish a clean, modern city.
The world of meat was full of old-fashioned ritual that resisted change. Herders moved cattle along the streets of today’s Lower East Side to the slaughterhouses on the banks of the Collect Pond. Alongside the pond, the legendary Bull’s Head Tavern on the Bowery became a literal stock market, where drovers and butchers negotiated for animals over beers, taking breaks to watch dogfights and bearbaiting outside. Most days, the butchers would wheelbarrow their meat back to their simple stalls before dawn. Butchers wore white aprons over their elegant black suits with bowties and top hats. On days when especially fine cattle came in, the butchers would parade the animals with a marching band past the homes of wealthy customers, to lure them outside to order particular cuts of beef.
“Sounds like a very efficient advertising campaign,” says Tom Mylan.
ON a sunny day in June 2006, in a dim restaurant in back of a general store, Tom Mylan is sitting on a barstool. He has steel-blue eyes, a square jaw, and Clark Kent glasses, and only his heavy build and reluctance to make eye contact save him from being a classic pretty boy. At this moment, he is the manager and buyer for Marlow & Sons, a Brooklyn restaurant that is also a little so-old-fashioned-it’s-hip one-room general store. He is wry, funny, and also obsessed.
No one yet associates Tom Mylan with meat or sees him as the conquering hero of hipstavore Brooklyn. For now, Tom is fascinated with local cheeses, and also curating what he doesn’t mind saying is the largest selection of honeys in town. That means chestnut, lime, wild strawberry, and dandelion Italian honeys; starthistle and fireweed honeys from California; thick, opalescent Hawaiian honey from a single grove of kiawe trees, so light that it tingles on the tongue; and city-produced local honeys from the South Bronx and Fort Greene, Brooklyn—some thirty honeys in all. Tom took the train to fetch the Bronx honey himself, taping cases of little jars together so he could carry them on his shoulder on the subway.
Tom spent his earliest years in Reno, Nevada. His parents divorced, and Tom’s mom worked the swing shift as a cashier in a hotel casino. Tom would often come home alone after school and make pizza bagels for dinner while he watched Julia Child and Jeff Smith on TV. Cooking meant company. For years of Christmases, Tom gave his mom the latest version of Jeff Smith’s Frugal Gourmet cookbook. Watching food TV was Tom’s first indication that there was a world beyond what he knew, a place that tasted different.
He went to art school then moved to New York with no clear plan, carrying a roll of canvas and an easel, in order to paint, and a laptop so he could write a novel. Soon he found a job at the famous Murray’s Cheese Shop in the West Village. Chefs would come by the store and invite the cheesemongers back to their restaurants for a little tasting on the house. Tom and his friends ate food they couldn’t afford: “It made us aspirational,” Tom said. On a lunch break, one would buy some pork from the old-style butcher Ottomanelli, another would pick up rare figs at the farmers’ market. In the evening, they’d all end up at someone’s apartment, drinking wine and stuffing figs into a butterflied pork loin.