1979, an artist/photographer walks into a bar at the fish
market at 4am, and a big man walks up to her, with an icy stare, and says “get
the fuck out.” The neighborhood was the Fulton fish market area, a men-only
zone, and hostile. She did gain the trust of some locals, but others remained
suspicious. After looking at the author’s photos, and reading her account of
the area, I can see why.
Barbara Mensch was
one of three kinds of people who you’d see in the vicinity of South Street and
the Fulton fish market. You had the Wall Street financiers, then the artists in
the lofts, and finally the men who worked on the docks. For over 100 years the
area was a seaport, and even after the seaports moved to New Jersey and
Philadelphia, the fish market stayed. Towering glass office buildings hovered
over the rotting piers, where men in bloody overalls loaded fish for the
wholesalers. The industry was controlled by the mob, and the workers, on top of
their backbreaking night shift work, had to deal with mob shakedowns. The place
was dirty, smelly, and rough.
Mensch has some
photos that she (discreetly) took of the bar’s daytime customers, against the
advice of the barkeep and some jewelry-wearing guys. In the grainy photos, a
salty-looking old white man in a sailor’s peaked cap sits with two scrawny
leather-clad black women, most likely prostitutes. According to her, the guy
was English, possibly came as a sailor on one of the boats that used to dock
here, and stayed on, living in an apartment in one of the filthy tenements of
the area. I might add that South Street area was not a tourist attraction in
the late 1970’s, but a filthy, rat-infested, dangerous place. It’s mentioned in
the French Connection, where in the early 60’s you could find nasty dive bars
on Pike Slip.
The photos aren’t
exceptional, they’re mostly the same pictures of rough, dirty white guys, few
blacks worked on the docks. Unlike most photos that can’t give you much other
than the image, Mensch’s photos give you a five-senses feel, so much that you
can almost smell the fish! You also get a sense of how cold the men ached from
the cold, and in the summer they must have been assaulted by the smell. Mensch
writes that the dock workers weren’t happy about having to answer to the mob
(on top of all their other problems), but at the same time they didn’t like
government interference. They had a “where were you all those years” kind of
attitude, and viewed the authorities as strangers who’d never been there for
them. Almost all of the workers were Irish or Italian, and some of them lived
on the Lower East Side, which at the time was also a hellhole.
The place had its
own laws, everything was based on trust (not as violent as you’d think) and the
rules were simple; if you screwed up you never worked their again. It was a
great place for ex-cons and illegal aliens, lots of Englishmen who came here as
sailors. However, right after these photos were taken, the fish market was
reduced. Thanks to the increase of high-priced real estate in the area, and the
fact that the seaport was becoming a tourist spot, the city stepped in and
regulated everything. Trucks had to be out of there by 10am so as not to bother
the suit-wearing Wall Street guys. There’s a funny photo of a guy in an
expensive suit and carrying a briefcase, walking briskly past guys in overalls
unloading crates, and he looks like the sort of Italian American who in another
decade would’ve worked at the docks. Another shows high-heeled yuppie chicks
strutting past the men with crates. Good thing they didn’t need to use the
bathrooms, because the walls were covered in nudie pics.
There are other
books about old New York, and I’ll name a few; The City That Became Safe, City
of Disorder, Selling the Lower East
Side. These books are scholarly, but they lack what this book has, and that
is the primary source. Mensch not only includes photos, but also her words. She
writes a firsthand account of her experience there, from someone who watched it
all unfold up close
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