FEEDING THE CITY
Oliver E. Allen

Before city planners in the 1960s bestowed the name Tribeca on the triangular area below Canal Street, the western part of that Lower Manhattan neighborhood was for generations known to New Yorkers as the Washington Market and served as the city?s principal food depot. Operating virtually around the clock, it took in foodstuffs that had arrived across the Hudson River by barge and either stored it in vast (and handsome) warehouses or sold it directly to retail stores, restaurants or even individual consumers. But its name was slightly confusing, for "the Market" connoted both a specific building and a specialized district that had grown up to the north of it.

The building was a mammoth skylit structure occupying an entire city block at Washington and Fulton streets ? a site that in the 1960s would become part of the World Trade Center. It was a gargantuan food bazaar that sold everything from cheeses and spices to rare delicacies like muskrat meat and whale steak. It had been the successor to a number of smaller public markets in Lower Manhattan that had flourished in colonial days and then one by one disappeared until only the Washington Market remained. But as the city grew in the 19th Century so did its appetite and soon the main building had spawned great numbers of wholesale food-handling establishments that lined the streets uptown in what we now call Tribeca.

Wagons surround the American Grocery Building at Reade and Hudson Streets

Partly for customer convenience and partly because tradesmen tend to flock together, different parts of Tribeca specialized in different foods. In the blocks from Greenwich Street west to the Hudson and centering along Washington Street, fruits and vegetables were sold. The Duane Park area including Reade Street south of it and Jay Street to the north was the city?s dairy center, offering butter, eggs and cheeses; just to the north of that, on the corner of Hudson and Jay streets, the Mercantile Exchange handled large-scale trading not only of butter and eggs but potatoes, dressed poultry and other substances.

Van Houten's cocoa was sold from a building at Hudson and Worth Streets

Wholesale meat establishments tended to be on side streets north of Jay. And throughout the area were purveyors of every other kind of eatable (and drinkable) imaginable. Some wholesalers occupied entire buildings while others took over just a single floor; a few operated lucratively doing an impromptu business on a single barrel head. Underlying many of the streets were pipes carrying sub-freezing brine (mainly from refrigeration concerns on Ericsson Place) to cold warehouses for keeping perishables fresh.

Business was virtually around-the-clock, but because most city stores and restaurants needed food supplies early in the morning, the Washington Market?s peak hours were at night, from 9 or 10 p.m. almost until dawn. Around midnight Washington Street in particular was a madhouse as trucks and wagons delivering food from the docks jostled with those making pickups and the shouts of wholesalers, porters and dray-men filled the air. From all over New York people would come just to view the mayhem (and perhaps to enjoy some exotic trifle that presented itself).

Then it all disappeared. The first to go was the original Market building at Washington and Fulton, which closed in 1956, unable to compete with more efficient stores and outlets elsewhere in the city. Then the increased use of huge trucks that could not navigate efficiently though Tribeca?s cramped streets spelled the decline of the wholesale food concerns, which either moved away (many to the Hunts Point wholesale market in the Bronx) or simply went out of business.

The Mercantile Exchange left its Harrison Street building for the World Trade Center in the 1970s. The last sizeable food operation to depart was Harry Wils and Company, a dealer in butter and eggs as well as many specialty foods whose trucks had been a familiar sight lining Duane Street across from Duane Park. After almost eight decades in Tribeca it finally moved, in 1999, to Secaucus, New Jersey.

Harry Wils & Co. in the 1990s was Tribeca's last major food wholesaler
Allan Tannenbaum