Eat the City(89)

1 “The finest farmlands in America”: Daniel M. Tredwell, quoted in Marc Linder & Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings Country (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 1.

2 “So far as possible”: M. B. Levick, “In the Hidden Gardens of Manhattan,” New York Times, April 19, 1925.

3 Lenape Native Americans cultivated: Anne Mendelson, “The Lenapes: In Search of Pre-European Foodways in the Greater New York Region,” in Gastropolis: Food and New York City, ed. Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 15–33; Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8–9.

4 “Dear Charlie”: Letter from Booker T. Washington to Charles W. Anderson, January 26, 1907, Washington Papers, Library of Congress, Box 35. Quoted in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

5 One Grady C. Houston: Charlayne Hunter, “An Entrepreneur’s Trucks Bring Southern Soul Food to Harlem,” New York Times, December 20, 1971.

6 Pig Foot Mary, née Lillian Harris: Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

7 A woman named Nora Mair: Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 328.

8 “snare a carrot”: Mildred Adams, “City Gardens in a Setting of Stone,” New York Times, August 28, 1927.

9 suitcases filled with fresh peaches: Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), 296.

10 “Music too tight.”: Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981), 152.

11 “There’ll be plenty of pig feet”: Frank Byrd, “Rent Parties,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, by Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, and Other Voices of a Generation, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad, 1999).

12 Thelonious Monk wore: John T. Edge, Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South (Athens, GA: Hill Street Press, 2002), 19.

13 Uptown manufacturing jobs were evaporating: Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 409.

14 about 14 percent of Harlem residents: Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 121–22.

15 more than half of Harlem’s economy hinged: Fred J. Cook, “The Black Mafia Moves into the Numbers Racket,” New York Times, April 4, 1971.

16 “I hope”: “Tanner’s Column,” New York Amsterdam News, July 1, 1967.

17 FDNY veterans still call: Most of these incredible anecdotes about fires in the 1970s are from Joe Flood, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—and Determined the Future of Cities (New York: Riverhead, 2010).

18 From 1970 to 1980: Ibid.

19 “Something happened”: Leslie Maitland, “Air of Uncertainty Dogs Coney Island,” New York Times, November 3, 1975.

20 “Stretches of empty blocks”: Roger Starr, “Making New York Smaller,” New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1976.

21 “Parts of New York City”: “Crowded Streets and Empty Lots,” New York Times, September 1, 1983.

22 Booker T. Washington described the farm: Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 44.

23 Eldridge Cleaver noted: Eldridge Cleaver, “The Land Question and Black Liberation,” in Confrontation vs. Compromise: 1945 to the Present: African American Political Thought, vol. 2, ed. Marcus Pohlmann (New York: Routledge, 2002).

24 “This is a step to improve”: Murray Schumach, “1,000 ‘Farms’ Planned on Lots in New York,” New York Times, April 26, 1977.

25 His Cornell University Cooperative Extension Program: “Harvest Time in City Lots Where Rubble Grew,” New York Times, September 6, 1979.

26 Ameroso soon found that keeping the pH: Tom Fox, Ian Koeppel, and Susan Kellam, Struggle for Space: The Greening of New York City 1970–1984 (New York: Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, 1985), 19.

27 “The fact of the matter is”: “Talk of the Town: Green,” The New Yorker, June 26, 1978, 21–22.

28 “Sign right by the X”: Ibid. 23

29 sprouted as many as 1,000 gardens: Estimates vary wildly. This conforms to estimates given by Ken Davies and John Ameroso in separate interviews.

30 “Mr. Governor, if you have this taken away”: “Whites Planning to Take Over Numbers in Harlem,” New York Amsterdam News, April 16, 1977.

31 “This is a free market economy”: Robert Polner, “Rudy: Sales Will Go On,” Newsday, January 12, 1999.

32 “No gardens, no peas!”: Monica Polanco, “ ‘No Gardens, No Peas,’ Cry Protesters in Park,” New York Daily News, April 11, 1999.

33 Several NYU researchers proved: Ioan Voicu and Vicki Been, “The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values,” Real Estate Economics 36 (2008): 241–83.





3. MEAT


Roger Horowitz’s informative and well-written book Putting Meat on the American Table was singularly helpful, and his other articles were great too. Two books by nineteenth-century butcher Thomas De Voe, The Market Book and The Market Assistant, both available online, were time capsules that helped me to understand the world of a butcher in a bow tie and top hat. De Voe’s Abattoirs gave a sweeping history of slaughterhouses. Various reports of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation were helpful to cobble together a history of the Fourteenth Street meat market, as was the 1962 study of the Fourteenth Street Market by the USDA, and interviews with lawyers, landlords, and meatpackers who remember it. Joshua B. Freeman’s Working-Class New York gives a sense of the manufacturing city that is no more. Butcher Tom Mylan’s various writings, on blogs and in myriad publications, helped tell his personal story.