THE END OF FULTON FISH MARKET Hunts Point's new tourist motto—"Come for the Stank, Stay for the Ska
November 16, 2005
THE END OF FULTON FISH MARKET
Hunts Point's new tourist motto—"Come for the Stank, Stay for the Skanks."
Written as Xandi Line
The move of the Fulton Fish Market to Hunts Point last week was a long time coming. The New York Times has expressed distress for the state of the Fulton Fish Market as far back as 1856. Born in the early 1800s, its location along the ports and piers of the East River initially proved essential. However, with the revolution of steam engines and trade by train in the mid-1800s, the market's heyday quickly disappeared. Somehow, it managed to hang around another century and a half.
The end began in 1999 with an FDA regulation requiring refrigeration, a utility not available to the market. In its dilapidated condition, it had been doing business "over ice" for nearly two centuries.
Where market work was once for immigrants, Italians have been the main workers there for generations, with men working from childhood to old age and sons working with fathers. Lately, a number of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans have joined them.
There are men who have spent 50 years at the market and recall Harlond Giuliani, Rudy's father. A known alcoholic and one-time Sing-Sing inmate, he would come into the market to buy seafood. After Harlond repeatedly parked in a spot he wasn't allowed to use, boasting that he could do what he wanted because his son was an up-and-coming New York politician, his car was finally trashed. Giulianis were no longer respected in the market.
When Rudy went after the market as a district attorney, he had little sway. But when he became mayor, that changed. Frank, a fish filleter who has been at the market for decades, claims that when Giuliani finally did do something about the market, the city ended up being the biggest mobster there, closing businesses and kicking people out without filing charges, separating brothers from working the same stalls and implementing fingerprinting and IDs for all employees.
"The Fulton Fish Market is invisible to most people," Mitchell Moss wrote a few years back. It's open when the city sleeps, closed well before the morning commute. Leaving the Chinatown sweatshops aside, it's about the last honest work in Manhattan. The city owns the big airline-hangar buildings that make up much of the market. Companies were paying as little as five dollars a square foot for what's now prime Manhattan real estate. One city report explains that "we are also enhancing the redevelopment of the former Fish Market site to make the historic South Street Seaport a more desirable residential, retail and expanded museum district."
Consider FW Wilkisson Inc., a stand at 16 Fulton Market that has been a Wilkisson family business since 1891. "The seaport without the Fulton Fish Market isn't even a seaport!" a longstanding market veteran insisted as he filleted his fish. "It's a great thing for lower Manhattan. They are getting a great piece of real estate to develop," says Majora Carter, a member of the Point Community Development Corporation and recent MacArthur "genius" grant winner.
The city, of course, claims the move will put Hunts Point on the map. "Visitors come from all over the world to see how we make [the market] work, and now that international awareness will be increased." How about, "Come for the Stank, Stay for the Skanks" as a new tourism motto for Hunts Point?
