Where’s the catch?
The waters around Manhattan are teeming with fish, but the Fulton Fish Market has just closed — and that, says Harry Mount, is a crying shame
New York
If fishwives are good at swearing, their husbands are even better, particularly if they’re from the housing projects of Knickerbocker Village on Manhattan’s East Side, home to the toughest old New York Italians who never made it much further than Ellis Island. And even more so if they’re Italians who’ve been forced out of the place they’ve worked all their lives. ‘I should have gone into fucking computers or been a teacher like my daughter, instead of busting my balls with 300lb handcarts loaded with red snapper when it’s 20 below,’ I was told by Frank Tortorice, 54, originally of Knickerbocker Village, now of Staten Island, and furious at the closure of the Fulton Fish Market, where he’d worked for 36 years. Fulton Fish Market, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, was a sort of Bada-Billingsgate, New York’s fish harbour for 183 years and until November the last place in Manhattan where blue-collar workers worked out of doors, night after night, on the same spot for a lifetime.
For more than a century Fulton Fish Market was the place where politicians went to butter up the genuine New Yorker. A beaming Bobby Kennedy was photographed there with a fish porter and a sturgeon in his 1964 run for New York senator.
It was of the finnan haddie, a Scottish smoked haddock dish on sale in Fulton Fish Market, that Cole Porter wrote, ‘When some good scout invites me out/ To dine on some fine finnan haddie/ My baby’s sure, his love is secure/ Cos my heart belongs to Daddy.’ In Wonderful Town, Leonard Bernstein wrote of a would-be opera singer who ends up selling fish: ‘At the Fulton Market now he cries fish!/ What a waste,/ What a waste,/ What a waste of money and time!’ It’s all gone now, gone to Hunts Point in the Bronx and a new sealed-in $85 million refrigerated facility where no one but traders and buyers is allowed in; where idle passersby can’t trudge through mulched haddock heads in the horizontal morning sun from across the East River and enjoy a masochistic shudder at the smell of rotting tuna.
And pretty soon you won’t be able to duck into the restaurants in the early Victorian terrace houses running along the end of Wall Street and eat the freshest fish in New York. Already some of these houses, built of slim, dirty rose-pink, Hudson River brick, with tin cornices and slate mansard roofs, have been renovated and split up into flats — $8,500 a month for two bedrooms. And the others will go that way too, as developers wait for the smell of fish to drift away downriver and the lure of prime waterside property with views across the East River to kick in.
The end of the fish restaurants and the closure of the market are breaks in the last link in the chain between Manhattan and the sea life that surrounds it. New York harbour in the 17th century was home to half of the world’s oysters, with the Jamaica Bay, Rockaway and Saddle Rock of the East River some of the most succulent in America. Oysters were so plentiful that many of the roads of Staten Island are tarmac laid on oyster-shell. All around Manhattan there were lobster nets. There were soft-shell clams on the sludgy river beds around the Statue of Liberty and, elsewhere in the harbour, hard-shell clams — mostly littlenecks and cherrystones — mussels, mud shrimp, conchs, sea worms and sea plants.
Three centuries of pouring Manhattan’s sewage into the Hudson and East Rivers put paid to all that and, in 1927, the oyster beds were closed to prevent the spread of typhoid. (Although some old oyster-raking families — oysters were harvested with rakes or polehandled tongs — went on trawling the beds in the dead of night, eating them raw and in chowders and stews, with occasional outbreaks of sickness when the oysters were violently infected.) Despite the sewage — and, in the case of eels, because of the sewage — fish flourished. As late as 1951 the waters round Manhattan were one big aquarium during the great migrations along the middle Atlantic coast through spring, summer and autumn. Butterfish, blackfish, mackerel, porgy, cod, whiting, blackback flounder, alewife, summer herring and sea bass all spawned in enormous schools. Eels loved to colonise the 900-odd shipwrecks in New York harbour — of old tugs, ferryboats, yachts, barges and sidewheel pleasure cruisers. Accompanying the big schools of native fish were smaller groups of exiles from the warm south: scorpion fish, triggerfish, porcupine fish, lookdowns, hairtails, goggleeyed scad and halfbeaks.
The real killer was industrial pollution. By the 1970s you couldn’t be sick on an off New York oyster if you wanted to be. Industrial waste — pesticides, heavy metals and petroleum by-products — killed the oysters off altogether and a good deal of the fish.
The shellfish that had been landed at Fulton Fish Market direct from trawlers in the surrounding harbour now came from further afield — Long Island, Rhode Island, Maine. By the time the market closed last month, no fish arrived from across the water any more. Fulton had become a transport hub for fish that had been flown over and driven in by 18-wheelers from across America and the world: tilapia, tuna, salmon, squid, herring, cod, sturgeon, blue shark, mackerel, yellow pike and more.
The ironic thing is that now, just as Manhattan moves a step further away from the sea, the waters round it are cleaner than they’ve been for 80 years. Sturgeon, striped bass, shad, bluefish and even seals are back in the East River and the Hudson. Environmental activism and the departure of the old heavy industry from the foreshores of Queens and New Jersey that face on to the east and west sides of Manhattan have brought the sea life back.
The residential development of the old factories along these shores makes billions, and all with no poisonous by-products. The New Jersey waterfront — scene of On the Waterfront — is empty of the longshoremen featured in the film. It’s now full of bond traders. Smack in the middle of that waterfront is Hoboken, Frank Sinatra’s birthplace. Once home to the great late-19th-century wave of Sicilian immigrants, including Sinatra’s grandparents, Hoboken now houses bankers for the new Goldman Sachs headquarters a mile down the coast in Jersey City, a little cluster of skyscrapers.
In the Grandevous, Sinatra’s favourite old restaurant, which is lined with pictures of the singer, the proprietors have only recently relented and allowed Rod Stewart into the jukebox that was Frank-only territory for decades. They are also seeing new clientele eating their speciality — garlic bread wrapped in melted gorgonzola — alongside the traditional Italian blue-collar customers: journalists, artists and foreign students who can’t afford the rents 500 yards across the river in Manhattan. It’s only sad that, as New York’s industrial heartland is again pumped full of life, human and aquatic, the market that specialised in both has gone.
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