Essex Market

Written by Anne Wolff for Place Matters and Professor Gwynneth Malins Fall 2019 NYU Community and Public History Course

If you go to the south side corner of Delancey and Essex Streets and view the latest incarnation of the Essex Market, you might say to yourself “this is New York City’s oldest public market?” However, once you step into the glossy new building and read through their brief historical exhibit, you will appreciate the cultural heritage of the Essex Market and see that its legacy is strong. The new and vastly improved market opened in October 2019. The old market building, just north of Delancey Street and completely vacated in October, is currently standing vacant and slated for destruction, a reminder that New York City is an ever-evolving place. From Mayor LaGuardia’s victory in establishing the Essex Market in 1940 to its inclusion as a part of the controversial Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, and now as a core part of the Essex Crossing mixed-use development project, the Essex Market and its immediate environs experienced a transition decades in the making, which took several attempts across several mayoral administrations. While it is the end of an era for the Essex Market’s old home, its new location represents a much needed upgrade in quality and resources for both the merchants and vendors as well as those in the surrounding community of the Lower East Side.

In his 1862 book entitled The Market Book. Containing a Historical Account of the Public Markets in the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, Thomas De Voe, a butcher, referred to the Essex Market existing as far back as 1818. According to Suzanne Wasserman, peddlers collaborated in 1868 to create a pushcart market on nearby Hester Street and from there pushcarts proliferated. In the early 1900’s pushcarts were so numerous that they were considered a nuisance, leading to the establishment of the Department of Public Markets to license and regulate vendors. World War I briefly allowed the peddlers a respite but once Fiorello LaGuardia was elected mayor of New York, the days of pushcarts lining the streets of the Lower East Side were numbered.

The most densely populated neighborhood in Manhattan, the Lower East Side was an entry-point to immigrant life in New York. For decades leading up to the opening of the Essex Market, poor hawkers lined the streets selling foods, produce, dry goods, and second-hand items of all kinds. Fiorello LaGuardia was elected mayor in 1934. One of his first promises was to eradicate the embarrassment of pushcarts on the Lower East Side and throughout the city. While they provided inexpensive food to often poor immigrants, LaGuardia considered pushcarts to be a persistent and frustrating problem. Many were unlicensed “barkers” who numbered in the tens of thousands, clogged the streets, making them impassable to traffic. His suggestion was to create a covered market network throughout the city for the pushcart vendors to transition to respectable merchants. Mayor LaGuardia aimed to solve many problems at once: regulate the pushcart vendors by bringing them inside, providing access to a safe and clean central location for the sale of goods; solve the problem of unlicensed peddlers; satisfy the claims of merchants in the area who complained that the peddlers devalued their property and negatively impacted their business. A dedication and formal opening took place on January 9, 1940 and the Essex Street Retail Market – a four-building complex with 475 stalls – was unveiled as a part of a network of city-owned markets envisioned by LaGuardia. Rent was $4.25 per stall per week.

In the process LaGuardia used WPA funds to clean up the streets and create more room for increased car traffic.

After World War II, the neighborhood saw significant change. Jewish and Italian families who had frequented the market were now moving to Brooklyn and metropolitan area suburbs. Simultaneously, the rise of large supermarkets caused a reduction in traffic to the Essex Market. However, Puerto Rican families and later Chinese families moved into the neighborhood and the it needed to respond to the new community demands. Also at this time, shopping habits began to change for many New Yorkers. Refrigeration allowed for less-frequent trips to the market. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Essex Market held on despite increasing neglect and criminal activity in the neighborhood. According to the timeline on the Essex Market’s website, the city stepped in in 1995 and the NYEDC invested $1.5 million worth of renovations into the market. Some turnover of vendors occurred both in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Another transition was taking place – the market was not just a place to buy produce, meats, fish and dry goods for preparing meals at home but newer vendors sold prepared foods as well.

The Essex Market is incorporated within the vast Essex Crossing project, a partially finished vast development project of land that lay fallow due to corruption and indecision over what it should be, who should develop it, and most importantly, who would live there. One cannot discuss the history of the Essex Market without mention of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. In her book Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani details the beginnings of the project as follows: “In the mid-1960’s, New York City took ownership of this fourteen- square-block area of tenements for the then common but increasingly unpopular practice of urban renewal.” SPURA demolished tenements and displaced mostly Puerto Rican families. The community called for affordable housing to be built but there was no progress until 2014, when a scandal involving a local politician was uncovered. The Essex Crossing project broke ground in 2015 and today, more than half the buildings are complete. Essex Market is merely one part of a mixed-use plan for the area involving long-time organizations such as the Henry Street Settlement, Grand Street Settlement, and NYU Langone. Affordable housing units are being built and those who were displaced those many years ago were offered preferred applicant status. Of course, to offset the subsidized housing, market-rate housing must also be part of the equation. Herein lies the issue of gentrification and a potential loss of community identity and cultural history in the Lower East Side.

The fact that the Essex Market is experiencing a renaissance on the cusp of its eightieth anniversary is a tribute to the continued popularity of the Lower East Side as a desirable place to live but for vastly different reasons now compared to the early twentieth-century. The Essex Market’s website states that its mission is “to support small businesses that provide the Lower East Side with fresh, affordable, and high quality food items.” The market is bright, clean and has vast appeal, which is quite unlike its former home, which lacked lighting and was not as visually and architecturally appealing as the new space. While there were twenty eight vendors at the old market, twenty five made the move to the new location. There are now six grocery vendors, eighteen specialty vendors, and eleven prepared food vendors. Legacy vendors receive subsidized rent for their new locations within the market. The Essex Market Vendor Association and their businesses represent a vast cross-section of Lower East Side communities both past and present: Arancini Brothers make an assortment of Italian rice balls, Puerto Rico Importing Company sells fine coffees, Viva Fruits and Vegetables is a Dominican family-owned grocery, New Star Fish is run by a South Korean family, and Davidovich Bakery sells classic New York-style bagels. If this makes your mouth water, go and visit the Essex Market! Tours of the market are also run on most Saturdays by Turnstile Tours.

This project briefly explored the history of the Essex Market, which has been on the corner of Delancey and Essex Streets for nearly 80 years. The neighborhood is gentrifying at a rapid pace. People migrate, places change, and institutions adapt in order to survive. Today, the Essex Market can now compete with other trendy marketplaces in lower Manhattan, such as Chelsea Market and Gansevoort Market, yet it still retains the flavor of its past. The nearby Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street is riding a wave of popularity with tourists visiting from all over the country and is also able to capture the story of the Lower East Side and the immigrant experience to New York. The Market Line represents the latest Essex Crossing project to open in November 2019. Spanning three blocks and including 150 food stall vendors who are offering local and traditional ethnic food and drink. Run by mostly women and immigrants, the mix of offerings is vast and well-curated. The multicultural aspect of The Market Line is a tribute to the community identity and history of the Lower East Side. It is an example of how, while the community demographics have changed through the years, food can serve to preserve traditions and to connect and bring people together.