Hunts Point: The Food Capital of New York City
photos by Kercy Martelly
“When walking into the Fulton Fish Market, you immediately notice how big it is – three stories high and about as long as 5 football fields. Forklifts sped up and down the market and in and out of the entrances. Then, all over the ground, there was a blood bath from all the dead and butchered fish. I have never smelled so much fish. I still smell like fish.”
When I think of fancy places to eat, the first thought that comes to mind is a place in Manhattan somewhere like Catch, The Smith, Blue Ribbon Brasserie, or Sylvia's Restaurant. Their food is cooked by some of the finest chefs in the city, but something that isn’t talked about is how the actual food gets there – like the meat, fish and other ingredients. The ordinary person thinks about how good the ribeye steak is going to be, or gets their phone ready to take a picture of the seafood boil, but they fail to realize the whole reason most of these restaurants are able to serve their favorites dishes day in and day out is due to the distribution that is going on in the Hunts Point Distribution Center.
Located in the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, the Hunts Point Cooperative Market shares the area with the Fulton Fish Market and The Hunts Point Produce Market. All are in control of the city’s distribution. The market is responsible for about half of New York’s meat and has more than 50 independent businesses. Such an important place in close proximity to the school and its importance to the biggest city in the country should be talked about more often, but it’s overlooked. Anyone curious as to why there is so much traffic in the area can have their questions answered, too. The reason is due to hundreds of trucks leaving Hunts Point distribution center to deliver food to some of your favorite restaurants.
Some might wonder, with such a major role in our city’s meat, fish and ingredient distribution, what goes on in those 60 acres of land? Why isn’t this place talked about more? How did it come to be the largest meat, produce, and seafood market in the country? But before we get into providing an answer to those questions, we wanted to know what people already knew about the Hunts Point Distribution Center. We asked people what they knew about where they got their own food, and what they already know about Hunts Point.
When asking teachers around the school where they get their own food, they respond with really vague answers. A lot of them responded by saying they don’t really know where they get their food. Mr. Castro said “My mom makes most of my food and she buys most of our food from BJ’s,” showing that a mother’s love never grows old, but apart from that he doesn’t know where the food gets there or where it came from.
He’s not alone; there's a lot of people who don’t know either. There’s others that said they got their food from the supermarket, naming companies such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but they don’t know how it gets to our local convenience stores or supermarkets. Ms. Rebitzer even said she gets her food from DG, our former Director of Culture, who grows their own crops. When asking teachers what they knew about the Hunts Point Food Market ,they said they didn’t know or only knew some information about it because the teachers had a “PD earlier this year, where they talked about the Bronx, the beauty of the Bronx, and major landmarks in the Bronx, and heard someone mentioning the Hunts Point Food Market.”
In order to get the inside scoop about where our food comes from, we spent two days in the area of the market itself. We had the privilege to talk to Bruce Reingold, general manager of the Hunts Points Cooperative Market.
One interesting thing that people seem to not notice is that the Hunts Point Cooperative Market “delivers about 75 percent of all meat to the tristate area – all the restaurants, hotels, schools, supermarkets, butcher shops, bodegas.” Reingold told us about the refrigeration system they have, explaining how beneficial the powerhouse is to the market. The powerhouse is a building in which the meat is stored and kept cool by underground piping so each building tenant has refrigeration to keep their product cool. They keep constant surveillance of the temperature, and they know if there’s anything wrong with the product. In fact, according to Reingold, “every piece of meat is thoroughly x-rayed.” Yes. You heard that. Even your hamburgers get x-rayed.
At the market, there is a very high concentration of trucks coming in and out. There are 500 tenant trucks directly related to the businesses in the market that deliver everyday, while also 2,000 additional trucks that “deliver meat to everybody, every day.” Yearly they bring in about 4 million pounds of meat, which is crazy to think about.
They have 2000 parking spaces and 3000 employees which makes it very busy from 4 to 10 am in the morning to the point where you can’t even drive in such an enormous parking lot. Trucks from 60 years ago are now half the size of what they are now. When asking Reingold about the future of the market, he said some of the biggest issues are related to how crowded it is and how there is little room for expansion. The Hunts Point Cooperative Market has been running for a long time and it’s quite old, and now deteriorating with bricks falling off the side of the building, and he’s facing problems trying to have antiquated buildings refurbished. Of course there are things that have been upgraded to the refrigeration system and electrical system to make it quite modern, but still, to refrigerate the building costs them nearly 600,000 to 700,000 dollars a month, which is an additional cost to their expenses.
Founded in 1972, the Hunts Point Cooperative Market corralled most of the businesses that are there today from a number of other markets that are no longer in operation, including one in Harlem, and one not far from Comp Sci High, at Brook Avenue. They all moved up here to the Hunts Point Cooperative Market since it’s a great place to do business when it came to distribution and getting to the client’s location at a fast, timely rate. With it being located in the Bronx, 75% of workers are Bronx residents, either working as a driver, butcher, office people, warehouse workers, mechanics, and engineers. Their range of distribution is quite large, since they have trucks that go to Pittsburgh, South Jersey, and as far up north as Maine and Vermont. They even had some orders made and delivered to Las Vegas hotels. They deliver everywhere such as Peter Luger Steak House, to almost all the supermarkets, like Pathmark, C-Town, and more.
But their efficiency is also what is so amazing. Let’s take Peter Luger for example. Early in the morning, when it is dark, staff from the steak house will come to hand select their meat at Hunts Point, picking the best cuts. Then, a few hours later, their trucks come, pick up the tagged meat, and bring it to the restaurant.
Before our exit we got the opportunity to go into one of the storage units of one of the tenants. Reingold mentioned that the freezers were cold, but the temperature in that chamber was no joke. It made 34 degrees in NYC feel like summer. Our bodies went completely numb, and our noses turned red from how cold it got. We were only in there taking a look at all the meat for about 10 minutes, and our bodies had never felt so cold. You could begin to imagine how the workers feel while storing meat in the unit while in the summer, a mental battle to keep jackets on while coming in and out of the freezers in 90 degree humid weather.
We also had the privilege to tour the Fulton Fish Market, the second biggest fish market in the world, according to Lisa Samuels, who gave us our tour. When walking into the Fulton Fish Market, you immediately notice how big it is – three stories high and about as long as 5 football fields. Forklifts sped up and down the market and in and out of the entrances. Then, all over the ground, there was a blood bath from all the dead and butchered fish. I have never smelled so much fish. I still smell like fish.
Samuels began by telling us that the Fulton Fish Market is recently new and everyone came to the Hunts Point location in 2005, when they moved from the old place being South Street Seaport. She mentioned it wasn’t that much of a big change from the old place, but that the cultures who do business have shifted. In the past, there were a number of Jewish and Italisn buyers and businesses, and now there are many Asian ones.
There are about 22 shareholders that operate and sell in the market and each company has their own speciality when it comes to what fish was being sold, some of these companies are generational when it comes to the family business. These companies are in charge of about 40% of the city’s fish and where you get it from. There's about 2 million pounds of fish brought in each year, from companies like Emerald Seafood, Montauk Seafood, Lockwood & Winant, and more. Some of these companies located in the market were whole sale, but there were also retail stores which meant an ordinary person like you can have the opportunity to pick out the fish you desire.
There were all types of seafood located there – tunas the size of couches, salmon glistening with their mouths open, crabs piled on top of each other, octopus, shrimp, and much more. Each company had about 5 to 18 thousand square feet depending on what they need and what’s there to offer. Each company is granted cold storage, dry storage, and freezer space.
We spoke to Salvatore Ruggiero from Blue Ribbon Fish, and he told us about his story. Although this job wasn’t generational among his family he really “enjoys working at night” and made a joke about it being good for his marriage. He also told us about his marketing tactic in getting the best sales – you ask for an unreasonable price for your product and when they reject you offer, you tell them the actual amount, and they 9 times out of 10 accept it because they think they played you for going low, when in reality you played them. In fact, while talking to us, he was multi-tasking, as someone tried to haggle him for crab meat, and Ruggiero ended up getting the price he wanted. He said “we sell fish and tissues here,” because his customers sometimes needed the tissues after he played them for a good price. A true character. It feels like there are few people like Ruggiero in New York anymore. They call him the “Calamari King.”
When talking to other companies about where they got their product, some said exactly where, including Norway, Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, and more. They have to work to seek for the best product that sells in the season and what the market is asking for. One person told us his biggest sale one time was for 55,000 pounds of king crab that he obtained in Russia. The crazy fact is that a lot of these companies prefer cash instead of credit, and so people are walking around the fish market with tens of thousands of dollars in cash.
So, if you think you’ve seen everything in this world, then you haven’t been to the Fulton Fish Market in the South Bronx at five in the morning, with fish blood and guts streaking over your shoes, watching a man buy more crab meat than you’ve ever seen in your life while, all around you, you are surrounded by raw fish the size of a small couch. No. You haven’t seen everything. But we have. There is an old saying: you don’t want to know how the sausage gets made. But now we can say that we know. The sausage gets made just a few miles from Comp Sci High, at the Hunts Point Cooperative Market. And the fish gets sold across the street. And now you know how it works.