Eat the City(98)

53 “Ho! Clahmmmmm?mmmmms!”: Terry Roth, “Street Cries and Criers of New York,” WPA, November 3, 1938.

54 He would invent fish-related lyrics: Clyde (Kingfish) Smith, Marion Charles Hatch, November 29, 1939. WPA. American Memory, Library of Congress. memory.?loc.?gov/?ammem/?index.?html (accessed June 9, 2011).

55 the Times ran recipes for shad: “News of Food,” New York Times, April 22, 1947.

56 “Scarcely anything but weak-fish”: “Fresh Fish,” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art 5, no. 108 (April 22, 1871).

57 the Felicia, a Brooklyn-built wooden dragger: Norman Brouwer, “The New York Fisheries,” Seaport Magazine, Winter/Spring 1990.

58 “His face was dead gray”: Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), 53.

59 “Inshore, it’s dead”: “Pollution Wrecking Inshore Fishing,” New York Times, September 8, 1977.

60 State Department of Environmental Conservation banned: “Hudson-Harlem Eels Banned as Hazard,” New York Times, August 4, 1977.

61 “I was nearly hanged”: Josh Barbanel, “Council Panel Backs Ban on Fishing from Some City Bridges,” New York Times, December 16, 1984.

62 Fish can be contaminated at levels: Bridget Barclay, “Hudson River Angler Survey: A Report on the Adherence to Fish Consumption Health Advisories Among Hudson River Anglers,” Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1993, 35–36.

63 “I think if we do not reach out”: Virginia Flaton, co-chair, Citizens Advisory Committee, Harbor Estuary Program, “Hearing of the Committee on Waterfronts,” City Council, City of New York, June 17, 2002.

64 A pilot study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine: Anne Golden, M.D., et al., “Biomarkers of Human Health Risk in the Hudson River: The Hudson River Anglers Health Study (Pilot Stury 1999–2000),” presentation, Rutgers University, May 1, 2001.





7. WINE


William Prince’s A Treatise on the Vine and Alden Spooner’s The Cultivation of the American Grape Vine are both available online and helpful in laying out nineteenth-century Brooklyn winery history. Leon D. Adam’s The Wines of America offers a basic summary of New York State wines. Dry Manhattan, by Michael Lerner, was a fabulous rundown of New York during Prohibition. This chapter also relied extensively on newspaper accounts, interviews, and the private collection of Gale Robinson, who allowed me to examine business records belonging to her father, Meyer Robinson. The article “Wine Like Mother Used to Make” from Commentary magazine in May 1954 provided a snapshot of the people of Manischewitz wine.

1 “shining in its glass like a sun”: Rina Drory, Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2000).

2 “very suitable … for planting vineyards”: Jasper Danckaerts, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680.

3 elsewhere in Manhattan, European vines withered: Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33.

4 Isabella Gibbs from the Carolinas: William Prince, A Treatise on the Vine: Embracing Its History from the Earliest Ages to the Present Day, with Descriptions of Above Two Hundred Foreign and Eighty American Varieties; Together with a Complete Dissertation on the Establishment, Culture, and Management of Vineyards… (New York, 1830). Also Thomas Meehan, ed., The Gardener’s Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, —1860).

5 “They were much injured”: Alden Spooner, The Cultivation of American Grape Vines and Making of Wine (E. B. Spooner & Co., 1858), 69.

6 Another Brooklyn experimenter: Letter from Zachariah Lewis, Esq., to Alden Spooner, April 20, 1832, Brooklyn. Quoted in Spooner, The Cultivation of American Grape Vines, 70.

7 an elderly Frenchman named Monsieur Thiry: “A Grower of Grapes and Savings Banks,” New York Times, September 8, 1901.

8 Ephraim Wales Bull, of Concord, Massachussetts: “Found the Concord Grape; Recent Death of Dr. Ephraim W. Bull in Concord, Mass.” New York Times, October 13, 1895.

9 “I looked about to see: “Grape, Raisin and Wine Production in the United States,” George C. Husmann, in Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1902. Washington Government Printing Office, 1903, 408.

10 Concord grape production doubled: “Wine-Making Along the Hudson; Magnitude of the Fruit-Growing Business and Its Results,” New York Times, October 25, 1883.

11 “Scores of speculators”: “A Great Grape Crop,” New York Times, September 6, 1888.

12 uncovered whiskey barrels: “Fruit Growers Are Happy; The Crops This Season Along the Hudson Have Been Fairly Good,” New York Times, October 8, 1890.

13 three and a half tons per acre: “How the Grape Industry Grew,” Independent, November 19, 1891.

14 a favorable record against the Catawba: “Grapes for the Million,” American Farmer, March 15, 1893.

15 “pious old graybeards”: Michael Gold, Jews Without Money (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1930), 114.

16 “The Hebrews do not seem to be”: “Residents of East Side Make Their Own Wine,” New York Tribune, November 29, 1903.

17 Vintners would pay a rabbi: “Dry Raiders Seize Sacramental Wine,” New York Times, September 13, 1922.