Eat the City(36)

When Tom takes questions, his students are more curious about their teacher than his subject: Is there a kind of meat he doesn’t like? (“I’m willing to try anything,” he says, “so when I say beef liver is really gross, it’s pretty f*cking gross.”) What’s the weirdest meat he ever ate? (“I like escargot and whelks and all those sort of snail things. I’ve never eaten oxen. I’ve had really good venison.”) “Ostrich?” asks a woman in the class seductively, tugging at her earlobe, tilting her head down and looking up into Tom’s eyes. (“I don’t know shit about ostrich,” he says. “I haven’t butchered ostrich. I haven’t eaten ostrich.”) Did he always want to be a butcher? (“I was vegetarian for two and a half years.”)

At the end of the night, he sits on a stool at the meat counter in the empty shop. Tom runs through ideas for putting meat animals in cities and suburbs. You could raise a goat on an urban rooftop, he suggests. “There’s a lot of people that have three-or four-acre backyards, or woodlots behind their house,” he said, citing New Jersey, Westchester County, and the Bronx. “These people could own a cow,” he proposes. “From one football field you can raise steers every two or three years that can feed the football team for a month.”


THE butchers at the old Fourteenth Street Market had other concerns. Many among the older generation had trained in Europe and landed in New York as the flotsam of war. Some had completed old-fashioned apprenticeships, such as one man who had worked in a slaughterhouse in France, where tradition required the apprentice to drink the warm blood of the first lamb he killed.

Sam Solasz learned butchering as a Jewish child in Poland, and perhaps his experience with slaughter served him during the war, when he lost his parents and fought against the Nazis with the partisans in the forest. He arrived in New York in 1951 carrying his butcher knives and ten dollars that he had earned cutting meat on board the ship. On his first full day on American soil, he got a meat job, and when he opened his own meatpacking business, a landsman, or countryman, at the West Side slaughterhouse saved him the finest animals.

Sam would wake his sons Mark and Scott around three a.m. on the days they didn’t have school, and pack them into the backseat of the gold Delta 88, where they slept on the way from Bay-side, Queens, to the Fourteenth Street Market. Mark remembers that it was always dark—his whole experience of his father’s work took place at night—and the locker room, with gray metal lockers, was lit with old bare lightbulbs.

The butchers’ sons apprenticed under their fathers’ tutelage, bouncing through the cobblestoned market trundling buckets of calf livers. The sons joined their fathers for lunch at Frank’s steak-house, where sawdust covered the tile floor, and men hung up their white coats on the wall and sat down, without bothering to remove their scabbards, to eat kidneys and sweetbreads, oxtails and calves’ liver and tripe. When it was time for the sons to graduate to full-time work, companies would craft shareholders’ agreements with two different classes of stock: fathers and sons (the sons couldn’t vote).

There was no Pathmark, no Fine Fare, no Trader Joe’s. The city’s butchers showed up before dawn at the meat market, moving from cooler to cooler, stopping at one for lamb, one for veal, one that only had briskets, another only flanks, poking, prodding, and, finally, stamping the meat they wanted so it would be delivered to their stores.

But that way of life was already disappearing. In 1961, a company called Iowa Beef Packers invented a new way to distribute meat. The goal had been to “take the skill out of every step of butchering,” one of the owners candidly said. This way, IBP could “take boys right off the farm” and install them in jobs on the disassembly line. In enormous new rural plants, cutters broke down each carcass into forty-four primal cuts stripped of most bone and fat. The meat was packed in plastic Cryovac packets and piled into boxes for shipment. Supermarkets in poor neighborhoods could now choose to order only rumps. Shops in rich areas could order only steaks. Soon IBP cut and boxed 65,000 cattle in a week, and grew bigger than all of the previous generation’s leading Chicago-based packers put together.

The rambling, crumbling, Mafia-infiltrated Fourteenth Street Market didn’t stand a chance. Just as sending dead animals had once proved cheaper than shipping live ones, now moving consumer cuts clearly costs less than transporting forequarters and hindquarters. The small, aging multilevel shops around Fourteenth Street were struggling to renovate and keep up to code, as black mold bloomed on the ceilings of the coolers, flaking paint fell into fresh meat, narrow wood doorways became encrusted with fat left over from meat scraping off as it was carried in. The market was so congested that trailers making meat deliveries had to wait an average of an hour and a quarter to even enter the loading area. Deliveries took over the sidewalks, so that a passing pedestrian could be hit by a flying calf on its way from a truck into the building.

Until spring of 1970, IBP was unable to sell its prepackaged meat in New York City because labor unions refused to handle it. But as the Midwesterners learned New York ways, IBP offered bribes to meat buyers at the city’s new supermarket chains. Neighborhood butcher shops disappeared. The new system reduced local meatpackers to unpackers of boxes, removers of specific cuts of meat, shippers.

Meanwhile, the city had acquired a hundred acres in Hunts Point, a dilapidated and remote section of the South Bronx, to build modern, contained wholesale meat and fish markets. The new meatpackers’ cooperative built members spacious two-story plants, extensive loading docks, and meat rail systems tailor-made for their products (higher for beef, lower for mutton and pork). Slowly the Fourteenth Street plants began to move in, receding from public view.