Eat the City(39)

Snow falls softly out the window, as the radio keeps Moe Albanese company while he works alone. His shop, Albanese Meats & Poultry, founded by his father, Vincenzo, has been open for more than seventy-five years, longer than any nearby business on Elizabeth Street, where boutiques now sell chic shoes and two-hundred-dollar jeans. Inside the butcher shop, the very old man—he won’t reveal his year of birth—moves slowly out from behind the room’s main furniture, a refrigerator half full of odd cuts of meat, to greet a customer. Rent on his store has gone up, but Moe holds on. “I’m going to make chop meat out of that,” he says as he slaps a thick round of beef onto a scale. “It’s steak. And I’m going to make some chicken cutlets. We don’t precut anything,” he says with pride, noting that he still picks out beef forequarters and hindquarters on hooks from the Fourteenth Street wholesalers. “This is not a supermarket. You come in, you order it, we cut it fresh right in front of you.”

In the Ozone Park section of Queens, Imran Uddin, a heavy-set, short, thirty-four-year-old man who favors fleece hoodies and a New York Knicks cap, runs the Madani Halal slaughterhouse, which appeals to nearby South Asian immigrants (Imran’s Pakistani father founded the place), and also to assorted others—Caribbeans, Central and South Americans, Europeans. Dominicans want brown chickens like the ones they kept in their yards back home. Imran’s heritage breed chickens are chewier, more chickeny tasting, not soggy, without that “water texture” of those from the supermarket. South Asians often want goats with a reddish coat, Imran says, which they say reminds them of the wild goats in the mountains of the Himalayas. People come to Imran seeking lean sheep, or fat ones, and they walk into the pen to feel the flesh along the animals’ spines. His customers want grass-fed, leaner meat, which they say smells like grass, like the earth itself.

Taking a chicken’s head in one hand, Imran will quickly whisper, “In the name of God the most gracious and most compassionate,” in Arabic, and in one swift movement use the other hand to cut the throat, often as the customers look on. “This is their sustenance, and they want to feel they have control over it,” he says. He serves a poor, remote, immigrant neighborhood the fresh, heritage, humanely raised meat that people from many rich neighborhoods seek but can’t find; he charges by weight, maybe seven dollars for a whole chicken. At Imran’s slaughterhouse, you can look your chicken in its milky, cataracted dark eye, which seems to hold a wink as the eyelid falls half shut. You can guarantee its freshness by witnessing its death.

In 1980, the number of city slaughterhouses had dwindled to only six, but then came waves of immigrants who considered it common sense to examine an animal alive before eating it and today there are eighty. Al Noor Live Halal Poultry on the edge of Park Slope in Brooklyn has a restaurant attached, so you could theoretically pick out a live animal to kill and then have it cooked. At one place in Flushing, Queens, a cow occasionally chews its cud in the basement. At Cohn Live Poultry, whose phone tree gives instructions in Yiddish, slaughterers say the Hebrew prayer for the blood of the animal. Latino slaughterhouse owners hire halal slaughterers to attract Muslims. Halal places allow Jewish shochets to bring in their own knives for a kosher kill. Even the kosher and halal places are known as viveros, the Spanish word for live poultry houses, and raise the local beacon of their trade, the sign POLLO VIVO.

The blacklash was inevitable. Residents of an upscale apartment building in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn complained in the New York Times of being awakened at dawn by “a collective cackle” as trucks from upstate farms each day unload six hundred chickens emitting that pungent, country-fair smell of animal concentrate. State legislators from Queens pushed through a law that for four years bars new slaughterhouses from opening within fifteen hundred feet of a residence—that is, most everywhere in New York City.

Yet some slaughter takes place without such niceties as an official license, governed only by the imperatives of hunger, tradition and thrift. If you go looking, you can find enough urban backwoodsmen raising meat in New York City to give you the sense that slaughter could lurk in any Queens estate or Bronx high-rise. Women and men in every borough still raise chickens, turkeys, ducks, or geese for meat. A forty-nine-year-old Argentine mechanic in the Jamaica section of Queens breeds dozens of rabbits in his backyard so he can slit their throats, slip off their skins, hang them on a tree branch, and make rich winter stews. A taxi driver in Brooklyn crams more than 400 Coturnix quails into his crowded basement, as part of his self-education program to retire to farm fowl in rural Haiti. A Pakistani family near Liberty Avenue in Queens holds a goat in the yard for sacrifice during the Eid al-Adha holiday. Italians keep capons for slaughtering at Christmas. A Parks Department official acknowledges that hunting groups in Highland Park in Queens and along the Harlem River in the Bronx train beagles to rouse rabbits from cover so they can be shot. People sometimes catch the turtles and ducks in the Central Park pond. Every so often rumors surface of a prowling pigeon hunter, bagging pigeons right off the street to cook for food.


AFTER a few pig roasts on the farm, neighbors of the Queens County Farm Museum began to agitate against keeping animals to raise for meat. They didn’t want mouth-watering porky smells wafting out of a place they considered a petting zoo. In 2011, the pigs became the object of a campaign. Word had gotten out that the farmhands had culled ducks, roosters, and hens that had been destroying the vegetable beds and taken them home for food. People went to the farm “for a soothing experience,” said a woman who started a petition drive against its raising meat animals. “They viewed the animals as pets, not as meat.” A state senator who helped fund the farm added pressure. The farm backed down. After centuries of debate over the role of livestock in cities, the latest experiment failed to take hold. There would be no more pig roast bacchanals under the stars.