Hearts Growing Fonder for Fish Market
By Barry Owens


It is still no walk in the park, but there is little argument from residents and business owners that the stretch of waterfront between Fulton Street and Peck Slip is a more pleasant place to be these days. The Fulton Fish Market, which had operated there for 180 years, moved to the Bronx in early November.

The smell is, mostly, gone. Commercial prospects for the area have never been better. New residents are moving in. There are more overnight parking spaces beneath the FDR. And the city promises that the area will be completely made over with lighting, landscaping and kiosks, and says that the former fish market buildings may be redeveloped with needed retail or cultural space-or both.

Still, there remains a sense of loss.

"There is definitely a feeling of absence," said Nick Friedman, who usually works the overnights at the front desk of the Best Western Seaport Inn on Beekman Street. He was picking up a day shift one morning last month and described, in a single word, the feeling of his first night on the job without the clamor of the market outside the door.
"Weird," he called it.


It was not uncommon, Friedman said, for the lobby doors to swing open all night as workers stopped in to use the bathroom or to just stand around, shoot the bull, and warm up for a few minutes. "I actually miss them," he said.

"It's just scary quiet," said Larry Lynch, owner of Seaport Novelty and Gifts, a news and souvenir stand on Pier 17, where lottery sales, naturally, fell sharply after the market moved.

Even during daylight hours when the market was closed, there had been a sense that the quiet was only temporary. There were signs everywhere that the market had only just closed and would soon come roaring back to life. Splinters of wooden pallets and stray bits of plastic wrap littered the sidewalk. Birds combed the cobblestones for remains. And, depending on the hour, one might have found a thirsty worker, or dozen, stooped over beers at a local bar.

"I'm sad to see them go," said a bartender at The Paris Bar, a once-rough-and-tumble saloon that is as old as the market itself.

The bar was nearly empty on a recent morning, though. Outside, the number of seagulls perched overhead could be counted on one hand. Even the rats had been served notice, evidenced by a sign on a market pillar warning that the area had recently been treated with poison pellets. The only signs of life on the street were posters in the windows of an abandoned market building advertising "Bodies," an exhibit of human cadavers on view at 11 Fulton Street.

"I feel like I'm living in the dead zone," said Barbara Mensch, a photographer who moved into the area in 1979 and got to know many of the market's characters over the years.


"I don't know anyone, now," Mensch said, noting that new, and certainly less craggy, faces have begun to appear on the block. Most improbable, she added, was the wine store setting up shop at the former home of Fair Fish on South Street, where a year ago the owner, Frank Fogliano, told the Trib that more than once he had stood in waist-deep water brought on by hard rains and flooding.

And then there was the smell. Yolanda Franco, a manager at The Gap in the Seaport Mall, can attest to a fish stench so strong that it would seep into sweaters. "Even if [customers] tried to return the clothes at a different location, they could tell that they came from here," she said.

Laurence Woodbury, who works as a bartender at Carmine's Italian Seafood on Beekman Street and lives nearby with his girlfriend, is thankful that he can keep his windows open at night.

"I miss a lot of the guys, but I don't miss the racket," he said.

But the presence of the market workers was reassuring in some respects, he added. "Coming home at night, you always felt safe. I'm not sure how a couple of security guards in one of those electric cars can compare to that."

The city now controls the site, and security guards in carts frequently patrol what is now a 24-hour parking lot. BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, Porsches-there are more luxury cars in the lot than ever before, said parking lot manager Dualo Gonzalez.

"It's good, very good," he said. "They didn't want to come here before when you would open the door and maybe find a fish."

Artist Shannon McGarity, a Seaport resident for 11 years, walks her dog through the lot every morning. "It's nice to not be kicking up fish guts," she said. But, like Mensch, she worries that the area's rough-hewn charm is lost forever.

"It's still a fascinating place to live and there are still some artists around, but we're getting a lot of people from uptown down here now," she said.

Burt Feldman, the postman who has been walking the local route for 32 years, would like to be one of those newcomers. He lives near Coney Island and said he was still kicking himself for not making an offer on a Front Street loft that he looked at some 20 years ago.

"I don't know who can afford to live here, but let me tell ya', people are moving in," he said. "It's going to be a nice, quiet residential neighborhood."