Speaking at the Center for Architecture last night, photographer Barbara Mensch said there were two reasons why the Fulton Fish Market moved.
The first reason was their methods were outdated and lacked the technology needed for the industry to prosper.
The second reason is more complicated.
Mensch’s recently published book, South Street, is an amazing photographic homage to the people who worked in the fish market. The black and white photographs, taken in the 70s and 80s, document a time and place that is gone forever.
“There was an interesting triangle between the city, the fish mongers who leased two beautiful sheds on the East River and those families who owned the counting houses on the west side of the street and other factions: the police and the federal authorities,” she said.
She didn’t see all of the connections until putting her book together almost 30 years later. Back in 1987, Rudolf Giuliani, a U.S. Attorney in Manhattan at the time, filed a civil lawsuit against the fish market because he claimed the Mafia controlled it. “At the same time,” she said, “a new plan for Rouse Corporation was being put through City Council.”
In her archives she discovered a forgotten photograph of graffiti on the locker room wall above Carmine’s Bar. It said: Fuck the Corporation. “To me it was a very seminal photograph.”
The Fulton Fish Market community represented last wave of southern Italian, Jewish and Irish immigrants. These men and their families lived all around the Brooklyn Bridge—mostly on Cherry, Madison and Water Streets--for about a hundred years.
The fish market was not just a job to them. “Their whole lives, their whole culture and their whole way of being was connected to the street and this industry,” she said. “They began to see the end was near for them. They saw a corporate power becoming larger than even their small Mafia-controlled domain.”
Fast forwarding 30 years and comparing our culture now, she said, is very striking and very scary.
In addition to her book South Street, her photographs can also be viewed at the South Street Seaport Museum until December 31st. – Sherry Mazzocchi
Recent Comments