Eat the City(88)

Good people I met in the Washington Post newsroom helped me along: Tom Wilkinson, Gabe Escobar, David Hoffman, Phil Bennett, Sewell Chan, Anthony Shadid, Karl Vick, Julie Tate, Ann Gerhart, David Finkel, Robin Givhan, Keith Richburg, Peter Goodman, David Segal, Tiffany Harness, Lynn Medford, Dale Russakoff, Helayne Seidman, Barbara Vobejda, Ernesto Londo?o, Josh Partlow. Same thing at the New York Times: Jim Dwyer, Tony DePalma, Clyde Haberman, Ethan Bronner, Jenny 8. Lee, Wendell Jamison, Greg Winter, Christine Hauser. Thanks too to June Thomas.

Librarians are the hidden force behind historical nonfiction. Jay Barksdale set me up with a work space in the Allen Room of the New York Public Library. Hannah Miryam Belinfante at the NYPL went out of her way to help, as did Eric Robinson and Debra Bach at the New-York Historical Society, and Louisa Watrous at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

The skilled David Kaplowitz flew in from London for a whirlwind four-borough tour to make a beautiful video.

Friends have offered support and love without which this long project would not have been possible, and have been patient while I disappeared from them to write: Helena Wright, James Baldwin, Galit Seliktar and On and Tamuz Barak, Megan, Ty and Zora Citerman, Poppy Burke, Katya Pischalnikova, Rania Jawad, Irene Shen, David Kaplowitz, Nadir Abdessemed, Rebecca Miller, Jean-Louis Racine, Emilie Cassou, Vlasta Vranjes, Filipe Ribeiro, Marwan Kanafani, Kaoru Watanabe, Mohamad Bazzi, Annia Ciezadlo, Ana Campoy, Ruxandra Guidi, Michelle Hester, Emma Blijdenstein, Matthew Price, Kim Ghattas, Griff Witte, Yam Greenstein, Klancy Miller, and Tomoeh Murakami Tse (who also adorned me with her handmade jewelry).

Thanks to my inspiring family: Paula, Lee, Brian, Rachel, and Allison David; Eric, Ava, and Oren David and Yen Tov; Ilana David, Jean Vecina, and Noa David-Vecina; Sheila Mudrick, Stephanie Myers and Gillian Batt, and Natasha Myers and Dorion Sagan; Tallulah and Berenicci Hershorn; and the rest of the clan, whose support has sustained me. Thanks too to Debby Kaplan.

And most especially, thanks to my perceptive, brave, wickedly funny, amazing sister, Leslie Shulman, and my generous and grounded mother, Barbara Shulman, who have shown me what to strive for.

My father, Arthur Shulman, loved books, food, history, and cities. I wish he had lived to see this book, and so much else.

Thanks to the Callerys, the Blakemores, the Owens, David and Wendy Kemp, Carol and Art Gray, and Celine Cooper and family; thanks to Kitty Francis, Rochelle Smith, and the very special Linda Wolburgh. Thanks to Karen and Carolina Rivera.

Thanks to Jack Morrison, Cora and Joe Morrison, and Ida and Mac Morrison, for choosing to be my family.

Thanks to Jack Agüeros, Marie-Hélène and Alan Pratley, and to Natalia Agüeros-Macario and Cris Macario, to Lee Scheingold, Grace McCabe, and Glenda Rosenthal, for welcoming me into their family.

Finally, thanks to Marcel Agüeros for accompanying me to pig roasts in the Bronx and beer parties in Brooklyn, for dissecting many drafts of the book with surgical precision, for making me laugh and for keeping me steady and for otherwise standing by me during years of hard work.





NOTES


A complete list of sources is available at www.?robinshulman.?com.

A small number of books and documents broadly shaped my understanding of the issues, the foods, and the places I wrote about. The exhaustive WPA accounts of New York City’s food supply, Feeding the City, available at the Municipal Archives, provide a snapshot of an entire food system in the 1930s and early ’40s. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, in their sweeping narrative account of New York City, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898—1,236 pages long and never boring!—helped place many of the issues in context. Jeff Kisseloff in his incredible oral history of Manhattan, You Must Remember This, tells personal stories in the voices of the people who lived them. Luc Sante in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York showed me how to write about a hidden city. Jane Ziegelman in her fascinating and intimate history of the food culture of a single building, 97 Orchard, showed impacts of food on tenement life. Hasia Diner in Hungering for America and Donna Gabaccia in We Are What We Eat provided scholarly accounts of immigrant food histories. I am indebted to all of these works.





1. HONEY


This chapter was based largely on interviews, contemporary and historical newspaper accounts, and scientific papers on bees and the environment.

1 “Like human beings”: Neil Ulman, “Hobbyists Say Bees Are More Fun Than A Barrel of Monkeys,” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 1967.

2 “see it taken from the combs”: “Keeping Bees in Chicago,” New-York Tribune, October 28, 1900.

3 The manager of a beekeeping supply store: Meyer Berger, “Secretary of 5th Ave. Association Leaves at 70 After 35 Years and Stacks of Memories,” New York Times, June 1, 1956; Meyer Berger, “Beekeeping Is a Dwindling Hobby in the City, but Fanciers Still Abound in Suburbs,” New York Times, May 28, 1956.

4 Once, a tropical storm ripped: Emily S. Rueb, “In Rescue of Beehive Exposed by High Winds, Honey and Rancor,” New York Times, August 31, 2011.





2. VEGETABLES


Interviews and historical newspaper accounts of gardening shaped this chapter. Laura Lawson’s wonderful and well-researched book City Bountiful gave a great overview of the urban gardening movement in history. Access to the files of GreenThumb, New York City’s community garden program, helped tell the city’s more recent urban community gardening story. Of Cabbages and Kings County, by Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias, describes the evolution and decline of Brooklyn farming. Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto is an amazing book, which every other book on Harlem seems to cite or repeat. Joe Flood, in The Fires, tells the story of why and how the city burned in the 1970s, which is the prequel to how the city came to grow vegetables on vacant lots.