Eat the City(33)

Yet in New York, local demand for kosher meat sustained independent slaughterhouses, meatpackers, and butchers, and the city remained the largest meat processing center on the East Coast until World War II. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 17 million immigrants landed at the port of New York. Many had lost family farms or had seen their artisanal trades disappear. They were hungry. In the old countries, they had barely enough food to survive, and if meat was available, it was the animal’s least appealing and cheapest parts, used to flavor broths and stews.

In New York, they found a rich, meaty city where the easy access to beef and pork and mutton symbolized achievement. In America, the higher the salary, the more meat people ate—a fleshly standard of success. One man recalled that his grandfather would put a toothpick in his mouth as he left home “to give the impression that he had eaten meat.”

Look at old records of the businesses along cobblestoned Fourteenth Street and you can see the fourteen-block wholesale meat market take shape, soon to dominate the northeast. The Centennial Brewery converted to meat in 1901; the Merchants’ Print Works turned over to poultry distributors in 1911; a row of stores became a cold storage warehouse for meat in 1921. A big brick building on Thirteenth Street became a vocational high school for food trades, including butchery, complete with a walk-in cooler, a sawdust floor, and deliveries of whole animals for students to break down.

Freight trains sped down Tenth Avenue to deliver meat to the Fourteenth Street Market. Men known as West Side cowboys would wave a red flag or swing a lantern at the head of the train to clear the way. There were still so many train accidents that the street became known as Death Avenue. The High Line, an elevated freight line, had to be constructed from Thirty-Fourth Street down to Spring Street, cutting right inside of warehouses to make second-story meat deliveries. The butchers moved the animal carcasses from hooks in railcars to overhead meat tracks, shedding fat and blood.

You could walk into any cooler and see men hacking away in syncopation, fat flying, their bosses looking down on them from squinty-windowed upstairs loft offices. Other wholesale meat markets operated in the Bronx on Brook Avenue and in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, with smaller centers in Queens and in Harlem. Kosher sausage factories, including the Hebrew National hot dogs company on East Broadway, grew up all over the Lower East Side, making bologna, frankfurters, wienerwursts, corned beef, corned tongue, and kosher cooking fat for the new delicatessens. As late as 1929, a full third of the city’s beef was still slaughtered locally for Jewish customers. The West Side of Manhattan developed into a vast complex of stockyards and stables, which filled the city with a perfume of shit and death when the wind came east from New Jersey. The city, eager to retain the fresh meat and the jobs, subsidized the industry throughout the early twentieth century.


ONE morning at the Meat Hook, Tom is slicing bacon while looking toward the door. He’s expecting a delivery of two new cityraised, freshly slaughtered pigs from the Queens County Farm Museum. Everyone’s excited. Ben Turley, a tall butcher with pink cheeks like rosy tattoos, came in early to be present for the delivery. But so far, no pigs.

It’s easy to find time-filling tasks. Ben uses a cleaver to turn chunks of bacon into wide, fatty white strips. Sara Bigelow, a lean, black-banged butcher who works for the Meat Hook, snips the links between sausages. Another new butcher, the handlebar-mustachioed Matt Greene, slices ham. Tom uses his iPhone to photograph Canadian bacon—he often texts pretty meat pics to the restaurateurs he supplies and the farmers who supply him—until the phone interrupts him by vibrating. “The girl delivering the pigs was stopped because she was in the carpool lane,” he says as he hangs up. “Apparently she thought the pigs in the back counted as passengers.”

During Tom’s first visit to the Queens County Farm Museum, the head farmer had wanted to talk about marketing his pork. The place had long been a kind of petting zoo for school groups and families around the quiet Glen Oaks neighborhood, but the new farmer, Michael Grady Robertson, had broader ambitions. He hoped to build a working farm that would raise and sell pork, chicken, beef, mutton, and goat. He saw it as an opportunity to teach New Yorkers about small-scale, humane meat production, in contrast with large-scale industrial techniques.

He also saw it as more moral to keep the animals to nourish and educate people, rather than as living toys for children to pet. He wanted advice from Tom about how to solicit meat orders from restaurants, what they might pay per pound, when the pigs should be slaughtered, nuts-and-bolts sorts of things.

Soon, in the fall and spring, the Queens farm was getting new piglets from a breeder and allowing them to root about the grounds in movable pens. Pigs are such efficient foragers that some farmers rent them out to clear land. These pigs were rotated in and out of different blocks of woodland to clear poison ivy and garlic mustard and make room for healthy tree and plant growth. From fall to spring, or spring to fall, the Queens pigs foraged and ate feed, farm scraps, and leftover mash from the brewery, until they were heavier than most grown men. They were slaughtered in a job-training program for prisoners on Long Island and sent to Tom for butchering.

The ultimate flavor of the pork is unique to these pigs, raised on the peculiar fruits of the boroughs. “Awesome” is the word Tom uses to describe the taste. Richer, fuller, inordinately better than industrially raised pork, the meat of the Queens pigs is also chemically different, Tom says. Industrial pork rots quickly when exposed to light and air and produces a fat that feels slightly prickly, something like Velcro on the tongue. The pork from Queens has a more intense flavor and a smoother, lighter texture.