Eat the City(37)
In a larger shift, New York at midcentury, the country’s biggest industrial center, was sloughing off industry. The idea had been discussed for decades, since the Regional Plan Association in 1929 had proposed moving industry out of the city to make room for pristine, modern office towers and housing developments. The “stench of slaughterhouses filled the air a few hundred feet from Times Square” the association wrote in its 1929 Master Plan. “Such a situation outrages one’s sense of order. Everything seems misplaced.… One yearns to rearrange things to put things where they belong.” Members of the association included leading property owners with family names such as Rockefeller, Morgan, and Roosevelt, as well as representatives of the New York and Penn Central railroads and First National City Bank, who stood to profit from increased real estate values.
New York in 1947 had more manufacturing jobs than Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Boston put together, noted historian Joshua B. Freeman. As well as the meat market, Manhattan was a place of Districts: Fur, Printing, Flower, Leather, Diamond, Button, Electronics. There was still a queerness about the city’s small semi-industrial concerns: importers of armadillo meat and ostrich-egg agents, dealers in medical leeches and medieval-style engravers.
But real estate owners and policymakers began to talk more and more about “the best and highest use of the land,” that is, commercial and high-end residential real estate. In 1961, a new zoning law prohibited heavy manufacturing in large sections of the outer boroughs and in all but a few neighborhoods in Manhattan. From 1968 to 1977, as more rules changed, about 600,000 industrial jobs disappeared from the city, some of them in meat. The people who owned the newly zoned lands made a fortune.
The Fourteenth Street meat market was a holdout, where butchers in blood-spattered white coats built fires in oil cans on the sidewalks to warm their hands. The High Line moved its last three carloads of frozen turkeys in 1980, and then the elevated tracks fell out of use. Homeless kids who lived on the salt mountains by the West Side docks came by to scavenge cuts of meat. Transvestite prostitutes with blond wigs and pink chiffon pants scouted the cobblestone streets. “The sidewalks run with rivulets of greasy blood,” wrote the Times, “and prostitutes pick their way around discarded chunks of fat.”
Yet each year, more of the meatpackers sold out and retired to Florida, as their children made it clear they had no interest in the brutal, backbreaking nighttime world of meat. A single real estate investor had bought nearly a fifth of the market area from failing meatpacking plants and then sat on his holdings, thereby preserving the market. He died in 1999, leaving the area open to development.
THE remnants of the Fourteenth Street Market have now mostly moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx. At three a.m. on a Tuesday, a forty-four-foot refrigerated semi trailer pulls in from Chicago and backs into the loading docks of Master Purveyors, still run by Sam Solasz and his sons, Mark and Scott. The rear panel opens to reveal a pristine, preserved cold cargo: 42,000 pounds of forequarters and hindquarters of beef, all hanging by the leg from hooks attached to the ceiling of the truck. The truckful adds up to the carcasses of a hundred steers, worth more than $100,000. Stooped, laryngitic, wearing a hoodie that says CIRQUE DU SOLASZ from his daughter’s bat mitzvah (where real Cirque du Soleil contortionists performed a female-on-female act that shocked his Conservative Long Island synagogue), Mark Solasz yells out orders to the men preparing to unload the truck. “Why you smiling? Wipe that smile off your face!” he says.
Sam, Mark, and Scott quit the old meat market on Fourteenth Street in 2001, when they were facing lease negotiations on their rent of $6 a square foot at a time when neighborhood rents had shot up to $100 a square foot. Only about twenty-five meat companies remained at the Fourteenth Street Market, down from more than a hundred a decade prior.
Now at Hunts Point, they have designed their own low-slung two-story facility with long rows of loading docks and plenty of parking. Mark manages clients and arranges meat deliveries. Scott supervises meat processing and the dry-aging room. Their father, Sam, now in his eighties, grinds meat. The business moves more than 300,000 pounds of meat a week, including dry-aged beef for legendary restaurants such as Peter Luger and Smith & Wollensky, and also boxed beef for grocery stores such as Fairway.
Prime meat—the top 2 percent of the country’s cows—costs more than twice the price of choice and select meat, and has to hang. Laying the meat out flat crushes the muscle, stops the moisture from evaporating, and dissipates the flavor. But Mark Solasz’s meat is not like Tom Mylan’s meat. Mark’s meat mostly comes from big, distant farms, few of them interested in organic practices or grass-fed ideals, and most of them using plenty of antibiotics and grain for feed.
A hanging-meat system requires specialized luggers to lift quarter steers that weigh more than 250 pounds. Big Ron Jennings, a giant of a man at six-five and a steely 260 pounds, works with his partner under the white light of a single bulb in the truck. The light illuminates thick yellow fat, red stripes of muscle and the men themselves, as they use their bodies like machine conveyors to transfer carcasses to the warehouse’s system of ceiling hooks. It’s about technique, Ron says. “A guy with mediocre-type power can still do the work because he knows how to carry, how to grab hold of it, how to hold onto it towards your body.” Propelled by an even push, a cold quarter steer can swing out of the truck with frightening heft and force—shedding bits of fat and tissue as it jerks through the air and then slams into the other quarters of cattle that preceded it.