The Fulton Fish Market : a history / Jonathan H. Rees.

"The Fulton Fish Market started out in 1822 as a general food market like others in the city because it was located in a residential neighborhood. The merchants who operated there began to specialize in fish during the 1850s because there were efficiencies associated with wholesaling one product from a central location. In its heyday during the late-nineteenth century, fishing boats would bring their catch directly to the market's dock and sell them off the boat to the wholesalers with stalls there. From shad to salmon, oysters to turtles, everything from the water that people in the New York area wanted to eat came through this market. Despite its many difficulties, the Fulton Fish Market lasted longer than other legendary neighborhood-based business districts because its denizens recognized that in at least one important sense it had to change with the times. As fishing grew in scale and dietary importance, fishmongers learned more about the environmental effects of their business than even fishermen themselves. Even though volume at the market increased over the course of the twentieth century, the Fulton Fish Market and the area that surrounded it became a museum neighborhood, a place to go where people could observe a dying way of life and still get the freshest fish possible at that time. Gentrification overtook the market, much as it did other parts of Manhattan, not because its operations were inefficient, but because no industry could afford to remain on real estate which had become so valuable, so quickly. The working lives of the people who operated every part of the fish provisioning chain - with the Fulton Fish Market at its center - serve as the basis for explaining larger changes in the city and in society that led to this gradual but important transformation. The book straddles economic history, food history, urban history, environmental history, and the history of immigration. It is very clearly written, and should also reach general readers interested in NYC history."-- Provided by publisher.