Meatpacking District - Manhattan
Where's the Beef?
When I looked out my window this past Sunday morning and saw the first significant snowfall in what felt like years, I resisted the temptation to roll over and fall back asleep. Instead, I made a cup of coffee, grabbed my camera and tripod, and headed out into the unplowed city.
I eventually found myself in the Meatpacking District on the west side of Lower Manhattan, sheltering under a battered metal awning in front of Pastis, one of the first (but not the first) businesses that kickstarted the neighborhood’s dramatic transformation.
These eight irregularly shaped blocks at the northern tip of Greenwich Village are a microcosm of the city’s repudiation of its industrial past, the inevitable result of an economy now powered by finance and tech rather than the blue-collar manufacturing jobs on which it was built. Just recently, the last seven meatpackers in the Gansevoort Market Co-Op agreed to vacate their 66,000-square-foot, city-owned parcel ahead of their 2032 lease expiration. Aside from a handful of old signs and meticulously maintained Belgian block streets, the area now bears little connection to its bustling and bloody history.
Over the past decade, the unofficial neighborhood uniform of blood-stained white overalls has been replaced by Lululemon and Loro Piana, while the former slaughterhouses and packing plants are now home to Hermès and Herman Miller showrooms. The district boasts no fewer than three high-end electric vehicle dealerships, an alcohol-infused ice cream parlor, and a 90,000-square-foot “destination” Restoration Hardware where, in a perverse nod to the area’s past, you can spend $76 on a charred rib-eye.
FORT GANSEVOORT
In 1811, anticipating war with Britain, the city built Fort Gansevoort on the banks of the Hudson River. The fort was named for Peter Gansevoort, a Revolutionary War hero and the grandfather of Herman Melville. Decades later, after his magnum opus Moby-Dick completely flopped, Melville spent nearly twenty years as a customs inspector for the Department of Docks, working on the wharf at the foot of Gansevoort Street.
Not a single cannon was fired from the fort during the war, and as the city began a period of rapid expansion, the site was soon identified as a potential location for a new market. In the 1850s, the city bought the rights to the land beneath the Hudson adjacent to Fort Gansevoort from Jacob Astor, demolished the structure, and added another dish to the “great banquet of landfill,” pushing Manhattan’s shoreline further into the river. Washington Street was extended north to Little West 12th Street, and the new streets were paved with Belgian block, some of which remains today.
For much of the 19th century, New York’s food supply was concentrated farther south. Washington Market, which opened in 1813 at Fulton and West Streets in today’s Tribeca, was the city’s largest and provided New Yorkers with the bulk of their produce. The adjacent West Washington Market was established in 1853. While both were indispensable in feeding the city, the conditions were far from sanitary.
An article in The New York Times described the West Washington Market as “so abominably filthy that all description fails in carrying an adequate idea of its nastiness,” before going on to describe it anyway. According to the report, the market was “covered with an aggregation of rotten, tumble-down, rat-haunted sheds, reeking with noisome smells, their crowded passageways slippery with filth, and their roofs dilapidated and leaky.”
Washington Market fared little better, its gutters “reeking with slime” and emitting an odor that would “turn the stomach of anyone but a market man.”
By the 1870s, overcrowding and public-health concerns pushed the city markets north. The Gansevoort Market opened in 1879 on the site of the old fort, functioning as the city’s first farmers’ market, with growers from Long Island, New Jersey, and Staten Island selling produce directly from horse-drawn wagons to greengrocers and pushcart vendors.
It was a vast open square, with no permanent buildings, and the city collected twenty-five cents for each “stand.” The market was commonly known as the “Goose Market“ for the perfectly logical reason that “no goose not human was ever sold there.” Maybe in an attempt to placate all the disappointed people showing up at the market hoping to buy some geese, the city built a new and improved West Washington Market adjacent to the Goose Market in 1887.
The market, a grid of ten 2-story buildings, sold meat and dairy products and became the largest live poultry market in the world.
It was the beneficiary of the Manhattan Refrigerating Company which supplied cooled air via a system of pipes that ran underneath the neighborhood circulating thousands of gallons of salt water pumped from the Hudson River.
CHICKEN WARS
By 1919, New York City’s live poultry markets were selling an estimated 400,000 birds a week, valued at more than $28 million annually, with most of that activity centered at the West Washington Market. It was a messy business, rife with price-fixing and graft, placing the chicken at the center of a violent and immensely profitable criminal empire.
One of the racket’s first (non-feathered) victims was Barnet Baff, the so-called Kosher Poultry King, described as a portly man with a flowing Van Dyke beard. In 1910, Baff went to the District Attorney to complain about the practice of “overcropping,” feeding chickens sand and gravel to artificially plump them up before sale. His squawking led to the prosecution of eighty-seven crooked poultry dealers. In the years that followed, Baff’s continued cooperation helped secure additional convictions.
That cooperation, however, made him a target. In a move often cited as one of the first examples of ethnic crime group cooperation in the city, Big Joe Cohen, head of the poultry union, turned to the Italian Mafia, paying an East Harlem saloonkeeper named Ippolito Greco $4,200 to eliminate the “Baff problem.” On Thanksgiving Eve, 1914, two masked men gunned down Barnet Baff in front of one of his stalls at the West Washington Market. His murder was only the opening salvo in a chicken racket that would grow increasingly complex and pervasive.
Little does the lowly broiler, carelessly peeping in his Long Island or New Jersey chicken run, know what crimes may be committed over his carcass. He and 50,000,000 other chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys from all over the U. S. are shipped to New York City every year. Long before he fulfills his destiny in the pot or skillet, an amazing crime ring has its bloody eye on him.1
Soon, prices for live chickens were fixed citywide, wholesalers were assigned exclusive territories to prevent competition, and retailers were forced to buy only from approved dealers. Compliance was enforced through intimidation, beatings, and the occasional bombing. These practices were publicly exposed in the fall of 1929 in United States of America v. The Greater New York Live Poultry Chamber of Commerce, a case involving eighty-eight defendants accused of creating a “reign of terror.” The proceedings exposed the workings of the kosher poultry cartel and further cemented the West Washington Market’s reputation for corruption.
To put an end to the shenanigans once and for all, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia announced plans for a new, municipally owned poultry market in Queens. In 1942, the chickens left the West Washington Market for Long Island City, closing the book on one of the bloodiest chapters in the neighborhood’s history.
MINESHAFT
With the chicken business having flown the coop, beef and pork became the neighborhood’s dominant focus. Hundreds of small-scale slaughterhouses, wholesalers, and meat packers filled its refrigerated warehouses and industrial buildings, now linked to the rest of the city by newly constructed elevated rail lines.
In 1949, during construction of the Gansevoort Market Meat Center, which replaced the old farmers’ market, workers uncovered remnants of Fort Gansevoort. Five years later, the West Washington Market was demolished, and the Gansevoort Destructor, a massive garbage incineration plant, rose in its place. By the 1960s, technological advances in food packaging and refrigeration, along with the shift to containerized shipping, had drastically reduced the need for local meat-processing centers.
Still, the meatpackers around 14th Street persisted. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the remaining businesses supplied the majority of the city’s beef. At the same time, amid loading docks and cold-storage plants, a network of gay leather bars and late-night sex clubs, places like the Anvil, Zodiac, and the Mineshaft, made the Meatpacking District one of the city’s most notorious after-hours zones.
By the mid-1980s, the first visible signs of transformation appeared. On November 7, 1985, the Mineshaft was shut down by the New York City Department of Health as part of its AIDS prevention measures. Just months earlier, Florent, the 24-hour diner where transvestites and truckers rubbed shoulders with A-listers like Matthew Barney and Calvin Klein, had opened on what was then a desolate stretch of Gansevoort Street. Often credited with planting the first seeds of gentrification, Florent eventually gentrified itself out of the neighborhood, closing in 2008 after its rent was set to rise to $30,000 a month.
The following year, the southernmost section of the High Line, the park and greenway built atop the tracks that once carried sides of beef in and ribeyes and T-bones out, opened to the public. Six years later, in 2015, the Whitney Museum’s third incarnation, a Renzo Piano–designed building once described as the “conceptual built equivalent of Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square,” opened on the site of the former Gansevoort Market, towering over the last remaining meatpacking businesses. By this point, the neighborhood’s wholesale transformation was complete.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week's audio features the West Side Highway, snow being shoveled and melting off the metal awnings of a former factory, general street chatter, and sounds of the Hudson underneath David Hammons's Day's End sculpture.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
Before I started writing this week’s newsletter, I already knew I wanted to feature photographer Brian Rose. I’ve followed his work for years and we share many of the same photographic interests and sensibilities.
Brian has created several bodies of work documenting the city including Time and Space on the Lower East Side , WTC, and the 2014 book Metamorphosis Meatpacking District 1985 + 2013.
Right around the time the Mineshaft was closing and Florent was opening, Brian began to wander the streets of the Meatpacking District with his 4x5 view camera.
His perfectly composed images capture the area at its most serene, in the hours after the meatpackers and club-goers have gone home, the Belgian block streets and warehouses cast in a muted winter light. Brian returned in 2013 to rephotograph the same views.
Here is a selection of those photos:
Looking forward to the 2041 update!
For Brian’s most recent book, LAST STOP, he visits the neighborhoods at the ends of all of the subway lines in the city, an endeavor which I imagine should be of great interest to readers of this newsletter. The book, which would make a great last minute holiday gift, is available at McNally Jackson.
ODDS AND ENDS
In the 1980s, decades before you couldn’t walk two blocks without passing a cannabis dispensary, there was Mickey Cesar, the Pope of Pot. Mickey founded the nation’s first marijuana delivery service, operating out of a former comic book shop in the Meatpacking District he called the Church of Realized Fantasies. Anyone who called 1-800-WANT-POT could get a bag delivered to their door in under an hour. Mark Sager wrote a fantastic piece about Mickey’s operation for Rolling Stone, with accompanying photos by Mary Ellen Mark. The High Life and the Strange Times of the Pope of Pot.
In 1981, Nelson Sullivan moved into an apartment at 5 Ninth Avenue. What Mickey Cesar did for weed, Sullivan did for video-making, creating an early body of work that laid the foundation, for better or worse, for the now-ubiquitous practice of vlogging. Hauling a massive VHS camera through downtown Manhattan, Sullivan documented the scene from the inside, recording figures like Keith Haring and RuPaul while increasingly inserting himself into the frame. You can see some of his work here.
Lee Krasner’s Gansevoort Number 1, painted in 1934
This is the last neighborhood of 2025. Thanks, as always, for following along. See you next year!
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,745449,00.html
Lived in this hood for over 40 years. My books are in storage at the moment, but one of the, either "Maritime Mile" or "Greenwich Village and How It Got to be That Way" - or something like that - talks about how there was a 13th Avenue on landfill, down near where the marine firehouse is now. I think it shows a cold storage warehouse on the map. And, as a testament to NYC's maritime importance, they actually got RID of that land for many years to accommodate more shipping. If I can dig up the attribution, I will. Thanks for the piece today.
1. Thank you for covering a tiny bit of the city's LGBT+ history. It's always enlightening to hear about how hidden away these places had to be and how misunderstood and maligned AIDS was in political circles. Reagan really fucked us over on that front. It's tragic how unmoored in history a lot of us were without an older generation to anchor us, having been lost to the disease.
2. I need to hear more from that woman in the sights and sounds who was listing all the alcohol someone stole from her. She was really attached to that bottle of Casamigos. Sounded like quite a confrontation!
3. Those topsy-turvy looking buildings in the background of the 5th photo are bonkers. They made me feel a tiny bit seasick.