The 212 column revisits New York institutions that have helped define the city, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
At two in the morning, when most of the South Bronx is dark and quiet, enormous trucks lumber along the Bruckner Expressway toward Hunts Point, the little East River peninsula almost directly opposite Rikers Island. Wholesale warehouses here supply many of the city’s comestibles and among them, at 800 Food Center Drive, is the Fulton Fish Market.
The original incarnation of the market, which is now 202 years old, was 13 miles away in Lower Manhattan, near the Brooklyn Bridge. It opened in 1822 and remained there until 2005, when it outgrew its longtime home and moved up to the Bronx.
“Breakfast?” says Joe Gurrera as soon as I arrive. He’s standing at one of his stalls in the middle of the market and grinning as he slices a morsel off a 90-pound tuna. Gurrera, the 70-year-old owner of Citarella, a group of seven upscale grocery stores in New York and Connecticut that specialize in seafood, has worked at the Fulton Fish Market, which functions as a cooperative, most of his life. He was a teenager when he learned his way around the old market, helping his father, who had a fish store in Greenwich Village.
It’s cold in the market, which is essentially a 400,000-square-foot shed. Underfoot, the floors are wet with melting ice. Gurrera is one of 22 shareholders in the market, and his company Lockwood & Winant occupies about 11 percent of the space. He sources seafood for his Citarella shops and also sells to other fishmongers. Well before dawn, the market is alive with buyers and sellers meeting, greeting, bargaining. “Many of the shareholders have been around for four to six generations,” says Nicole Ackerina, 37, the C.E.O. of the market.
Urgent voices fill the air along with the squish of rubber boots. According to Ackerina, sales are competitive, and peak around 3 a.m., an hour after the market opens. “We work overnight so retailers and restaurants are well supplied with fresh fish,” she says, adding that the market provides 45 percent of the seafood used in the city’s five boroughs.
From upstairs on a kind of mezzanine, where most of the fishmongers keep offices, you can see the market floor, the men at work — and they are mostly men — and the fish laid out in cardboard boxes or on metal trays. There’s salmon, swordfish, wild porgy, halibut, oysters and live crabs wiggling for space in their baskets. Most of the seafood comes from the northeast — lobsters from Maine, bluefish from Long Island — but the assortment also includes abalone and sea cucumbers, shad and shad roe, caviar and Canadian geoduck. Gurrera sells Sicilian gambero rosso (a type of fiery red shrimp) and Tuscan branzino.
Fishmongers come from all over the tristate area. Some, like Anthony Lockwood, 31, who owns Liberty Fish Market in upstate New York’s Sullivan County, drive several hours two to three times a week. “It takes around two hours each way,” Lockwood says. “It’s worth it,” he adds. “It’s the biggest market with the freshest fish.”
The chef Eric Ripert, 59, a co-owner of Le Bernardin, arguably the finest seafood restaurant in New York, is still nostalgic for the original Fulton Fish Market. “It had a certain flair that transported you to another era,” he told me in an email.
Because it’s surrounded by water, New York has always been a fish-eating town. In his book “The Island at the Center of the World,” the historian Russell Shorto describes Henry Hudson and his crew sailing into New York Harbor in 1609: “Rounding a hooked point, they were startled at what they perceived to be three rivers. … They were in the outer reaches of New York Harbor, riding along the coast of Staten Island. Fish streamed thickly around them: salmon, mullet, wraith-like rays.” By the early 19th century, New Yorkers were buying their fish at markets that had cropped up along the East River, where boats came to unload their catch, often floating them in specially made containers called fish cars.
The great 20th-century New York chronicler Joseph Mitchell often wrote about the Fulton Fish Market, both in The New Yorker and in his collection of stories “Old Mr. Flood” (1948). The title character, Mr. Flood, is thought to have been in part Mitchell’s alter ego. “Mr. Flood visits the fish market every weekday morning,” wrote Mitchell. “He rises at five, has a cup of black coffee in the Hartford dining room, lights a cigar and begins a leisurely tour of the fish stalls, the oyster sheds, the flounder-filleting houses, the smoking lofts, and the piers. When he reaches Fulton Street, the pandemonium in the market invigorates him.”
In the 1970s, my father used to take me to the market. It was mysterious and magical: You could smell the salt and fish, which shimmered in the morning light while fishmongers sat on crates drinking coffee and warming their hands over oil-can fires. The remains of the old location are now Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Tin Building, a gleaming complex filled with restaurants and a gourmet market.
In the Bronx, the new Fulton Fish Market is largely wholesale, but individuals can also shop. It costs $7 to $10 at the entrance gate, including parking, if you arrive by car, $3 if you arrive on foot. Plans are in the works for pop-up restaurants, a renovated waterfront and even an artists’ residency, according to Ackerina.
Before I leave, I ask Gurrera what he eats for breakfast. The man who has loved fish all his life, says, with a sly smile, “I go to the gym; then I have steak and eggs.”
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