Eat the City(71)

Three clangs of a gong announced the start of fish sales at six a.m. “Whale and five chickens,” a rubber-booted salesman would shout in the argot of the market, meaning a large halibut and five small ones. “Pin blues” were small bluefish, and “scrod cod” were small codfish. Buyers practiced the centuries-old ritual of looking into a fish’s eyes for clarity, checking the color of its scales, rubbing a piece of its flesh between their fingers to determine its oiliness, tasting it. They wanted fresh.

The clam and crab men would arrive early at the market, before dawn, and then trawl the streets of the city, calling, “Ho! Clahmmmmm?mmmmms! Ho! Clahmmmmm?mmmms!” One African American fish seller explained his technique for reeling in customers. He would invent fish-related lyrics and sing songs like “Yo, ho ho, fish man!/Bring down your dishpan!/Fish ain’t but five cent a pound./So come on down.” He tried to game his audience: In Jewish neighborhoods, he would sing to the tunes of songs like “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn,” the popular number from a Yiddish musical. In Puerto Rican neighborhoods, he sang in Spanish. Among black people, he used a swing tune, and sometimes, when he sang, he said, “the kids be dancing the Lindy Hop and Trucking.” Fish sales were strong, and he credited his music. “To be any success at all, you had to have an original cry,” he said. “You got to put yourself in it. You’ve got to feel it.”

Meanwhile, the local commercial fishers practiced a certain New York-style fishing. Lobstermen had to check their pots very early in the morning, every day of the week, so that no one would steal the lobsters. Crabmen dredged for blue crabs by the Statue of Liberty, and navigated their haul into the Fulton market, where they would tie their boats together in a bobbing waterborne queue and sleep in them overnight to await the market’s opening. Legend says that a scallop boat once docked in a storm at Pier 17, bringing in thousands of pounds of scallops and a mutinying crew that refused to go back out on a rough and forbidding sea. The story says that the captain, waving a gun, rounded up his men by chasing them through the fish market.

The last large-scale commercial fishing ended in the decades after World War II. During the war, the government had shrouded the harbor in nets to keep out enemy submarines—incidentally entrapping schools of fish. An enthusiastic fisherman with a military deferment to catch shad could drop down a simple pound net and lift in a bonanza. After the war, Eastern Europe’s enormous factory ships came to the edge of the continental shelf and sucked up fish. In the 1940s, the Times ran recipes for shad caught in view of Midtown Manhattan (baked and stuffed with bread crumbs, celery, and sage), but the shad population soon plummeted. A clam, crab, and lobster industry thrived in Staten Island and Brooklyn, but by the 1950s, local fishing was winding down. “Scarcely anything but weakfish” sold at the Fulton Fish Market had lived any of its days in the waters of New York City. The last ship to call regularly with fish was the Felicia, a Brooklyn-built wooden dragger, which quit deliveries in the 1980s.

Philip Frabosilo’s father and maternal grandfather were fishers and fishmongers into the 1960s, and later worked in a smokehouse, where they smoked sturgeon and herrings and whiting. They would also take out a small rowboat and circle with a giant net near the Rockaways. Once, as his son watched, Philip’s father put the net in his mouth and swam with it, pulling a wake of fish with his teeth through the edge of the salty Atlantic. He would collect hundreds of fish in a day, fill a cart, and roll it around Manhattan, calling out “Porgies!” and “Bluefish!” and “Striped bass!” He was the last of a kind.


WITH no hope of receiving boats coming in from the waters, the Fulton Fish Market moved in 2005 to the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, where there was better highway access for trucks and a new, modern indoor market building, with loading docks, temperature controls, and level floors for Hi-Lo forklifts. Just past three a.m., I came in from a black, cold winter night to find the market at its height, flooded with white lights under 40-foot ceilings as Hi-Los speed down the central corridor.

The sellers wear their J-shaped fish hooks over their shoulders. The long wooden handles burned with their names—DAVE, ANTHONY—hang down front over their collarbones, and the sharp, short hook ends tear holes in their shirtbacks and wound the raw skin of their shoulderblades. They hook into the slippery fish to throw them from box to box, or present an especially fine one to a potential buyer for inspection. If a big fish sells, the vendor might wrap it up in a 50-pound unused dog food bag (they’re cheap), or in a waxed box, which he will carve out to make a hole for the fish tail. The soft smell of fresh, cold fish mingles with the sweet smell of cigars the sellers smoke at their stands.

The fish and shellfish come in from all over the world. Perfect ridged oyster shells are transported on a black tangle of seaweed from Harpswell, Maine. Black-eyed lobsters, their armored weaponry disabled with a few rubber bands on the claws, come from eastern Canada. The gray scales of a single 200-pound, $1,400 swordfish from Australia stretch across a whole table. Scarlet stripes of tuna from Thailand fill a row of plastic bags; Chilean sea bass from the deep ocean waters off Peru fill an icy four-foot box. The foreign fish enter the country on ice packs on planes with monitors that record their temperature throughout the flight; if the temperature rises above a certain level, the fish are condemned on arrival. “Price on skate!” a man walks into a stall and announces, gazing down on fleshy, freckled, grayish-red wings of skate on ice. “A dollar twenty-five, my friend,” comes the offer.