At 3 a.m. one day last week, crewmen began unloading draggers at Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market on the East River. Through the quiet streets leading to the market, giant trailer-trucks rumbled up with even bigger loads. There were cod and pollock from Massachusetts, salmon from Canada, croakers and sea bass from Maryland, lobsters from Maine, shrimp from Florida, clams and oysters from Long Island. They were put into barrels and boxes or just piled in the bins of stalls along the waterfront.
Promptly at 6, at the sound of a bell, retail buyers crowded into the slime-spattered aisles. Booted and aproned wholesalers waved samples in their faces, and shouted sales to clerks in a code gibberish by which they hoped to hide prices from competitors. By 11 a.m., nearly a million pounds of seafood had been sold. In this business-as-usual way, the biggest fish market in the world passed a historic milestone last week: it was 100 years old.
Out of a Wood Shed. Fish had been sold at the market, originally a one-block stretch at the foot of Fulton Street just north of Wall Street, since 1821. But it was not till 1848 that the city built a wooden shed to house the fishmongers.
Now, many of the market’s 100-odd companies have elaborate cold-storage vaults, and some have ice-making machinery. Fish are cleaned with such gadgets as automatic washing vats and electric-powered scale removers. For processing fish for hotels and other big customers, one company has built big tile workrooms that are as gleaming as a Hollywood steam bath. The market lives up to its boast: “If it swims, we handle it.” The Fulton fishmongers supply such exotic morsels as Japanese frog legs, Alaskan king crabs, Indian pompano, Irish bloaters and South African alewives.
Into a Hansom. Despite the hard, rough work, the market men like it. In the old days they did well enough to don Prince Albert coats after work and ride home in hansom cabs. They still pay their workers well. Example: fillet men (who can reduce a fish to pure meat with three or four deft swipes of a knife) get up to $125 a week.
The market’s companies, all privately owned, keep their net earnings secret, but last year, with a boost in sales because of high meat prices, they had an estimated gross of more than $85 million, up 20% over prewar. Last month, when meat prices began falling, fish sales held up and in some cases even increased. Fishmen decided that “people had to eat so much of our stuff during the war that they finally got fond of it. It’s the only food that hasn’t been fouled up by being vitaminized, tenderized or homogenized.” This year, the companies expect to gross $100 million.
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