Pushcarts on Bleecker Street
When former South Village resident Josette Lee emailed GVSHP a picture of her Dad from the 1970’s standing in front of two pushcarts located on Bleecker Street, we became as curious as she was about when exactly such carts disappeared from the South Village.
Pushcarts have been a part of New York City’s streets since their beginnings, but it was really in the post-Civil War era of heavy immigration that pushcart peddlers became so prolific. They were most frequently found in the immigrant communities of the Lower East Side and Italian communities such as the South Village. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who saw reform of immigrant customs as a form of advancement and modernization, closed the streets and sidewalks to peddlers in 1938, and opened indoor shared marketplaces such as the Essex Market on the Lower East Side. But the Bleecker Street pushcarts continued to be operated by legally permitted vendors, only 1,200 of which remained in all of New York City in 1945. For those interested in further information in this, Gotham Center for New York City History’s Executive Director Suzanne Wasserman’s article “Hawkers and Gawkers: Peddling and Markets in New York City” in Gastropolis: Food and New York City, provides a wonderful overview of the markets of the Lower East Side.
The now defunct Department of Markets put forward a resolution in 1962 to close the three “open air” markets still operating in New York: Bleecker Street, Mott Street, and Union Street in Brooklyn. A New York Times article from May 11, 1962 reports on the failure of this resolution to pass because of strong opposition for the closing of the Bleecker Street Market. That same article reveals the decline in the number of peddlers still working, stating that the market “stretches for two blocks, from Cornelia Street to Seventh Avenue. It once lined eleven city blocks. In 1935 there were 120 licensed pushcart merchants in that market area. Today there remain only ten, who operate a total of thirteen stands.”
We found an amazingly similar picture to Ms. Lee’s by George Roos, featured in the book Greenwich Village: A Photographic Guide written by Edmund Delaney and Charles Lockwood and published in 1976. These two pictures together, along with anecdotal evidence we have heard from South Villagers, tells us the market continued into the 1970s. But our initial research does not reveal whether the pushcarts were eventually closed by the City, or if they just disappeared by attrition. If any readers have information to share, submit a comment!
For more information about the Italian history of the South Village, see GVSHP’s report the “Italians of the South Village.”
They were still there when I moved from Morton Street in 1969.
As a kid going to school in the West Village in the 1970’s, I vividly remember the 1964 childrens’ book “The Pushcart War” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pushcart_War) which describes the (fictional) attempt by a trucking cartel to eliminate pushcarts from the city, and the pushcart vendors’ wily battle tactics in their fight to remain on the street (pea shooters with sharp tacks figured prominently in this). I had no idea that this must have been inspired by the actual attempt in 1962 to eliminate the pushcart vendors, with the motivation, no doubt, of improving traffic “flow” – a perennial idée fixe of urban planners back then, and to this day.
Also nice to see Carol Greitzer was involved in the real life fight to save the pushcarts – she was my Councilperson later on, and I interned at her office in my senior year of high school in 1980.
As for the pushcarts, I don’t have much recollection of them from my childhood in the 70s – but as a kid I was probably looking more for the shave ice vendors than pushcart vendors selling fruits and vegetables.
You can see sample pages of the book at
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_pushcart_war.html?id=IdKMqmpvxH0C
[…] is still bad (second only to Los Angeles) but there aren’t quite so many pushcarts around as there were in the early ’60s and they’re still a viable way to get your lunch. As a kid I missed a lot of the lesser […]
The last push cart on Bleecker Street was owned by Philip. He was on the North East corner of Jones street. He had said that the licenses were not allowed to be sold or transferred and as the owners retired or died the permits expired.
It was about 1957 and my mother was buying tomatoes and I believe the vendor’s name was Frank, she was having bad luck because the exposed side of the tomatoes looked good, but some of them were bad underneath, Frank lightly slapped her hand and told her he would pick out the tomatoes for her, my mother said that some of them were bad underneath and she wanted to pick them out herself. My mother ended up throwing a tomato at him. In a related push cart story, on Downing Street two blocks south of Bleecker there were green wooden push carts that people would push around town collecting rags, I was told they collected rags to make rag Bond paper. The push carts had the name of the business written on them, and the name was something involving Downing Street. I believe the rag carts were located in the same building where they made wooden barrels.