NEW YORK CITY (TND) — Over the course of New York City’s robust history as an inimitable setting for the delightfully unexpected and the charmingly eccentric, there is very little that hasn’t been sold from the bed of a pushcart or through the concession window of a food truck.
In the 19th century, the rhymes of penniless young girls advertising ears of sweet corn (“smoking hot, just from the pot”) became interwoven into the soundtrack of Manhattan’s Five Points neighborhood. Not far from the so-called hot-corn girls, "Apple Marys" peddled fruit out of baskets around the Financial District. Further uptown, there was the Lavender Flower Man, surrounded by the sweet scent of his plants, and the Poodle Dog Man, whose adoptable puppies invariably conformed to a specific template — always white, always immaculately clean, and always with a blue ribbon punctuating their monochromatic fur.
As years went by, New Yorkers mourned the changing times that left behind, among other things, the vivacious Irish women who knew precisely how to pick the market’s best apples for Wall Street workers and the pet salesperson with a monopoly on white dogs.
But there would eventually be successors, such as the young, long-haired vendors of the ‘60s who sold beads and paper flowers more for the love of artistry than for a profit. In the ‘70s, sweet tooths could be satisfied with chocolate mousse served from a tea cart in Washington Square Park. When a wave of Mexican immigrants arrived in New York from the state of Puebla in the ‘80s, they promptly introduced the city to their regional street food with tamales hauled around in pushcarts and tacos prepared on the go.
And from a cart at the Seaport neighborhood in the ‘90s, only purple objects were sold. The decade also gave rise to the iconic Halal Guys, who began serving signature chicken and rice to cab drivers in 1992 and is now planning to open its 100th location.
Then, a food truck frenzy — artisanal vegan ice cream, Belgian waffles piled with toppings, eggplant schnitzel, catfish po’boys, wagyu burgers on brioche buns, pulled pork burritos, organic slushies, truffle grilled cheese, and Japanese nacho tots, all served on the sidewalk.
Despite being plastered with photographs of gyros and pretzels bumped up to the highest saturation and further seeking attention with neon LED signs scrolling through the menu, it’s their persistent ubiquity on Midtown street corners that has enabled food carts to almost blend into the background of any classic New York City scene.
So accustomed to the sight of street vendors, a New Yorker may hurry through Herald Square without even registering the line of Sabrett hot dog carts catering to tourists outside of the Macy’s flagship store.
That’s not to say there’s any pervasive belief among New Yorkers that they’re above street food. Quite the opposite is true, with office employees and construction workers alike lining up for morning coffee and speedy, inexpensive lunches. But while tourists typically regard the mobile food carts as a New York City novelty that they must try at least once, those who live or work in the city tend to perceive the vendors' presence as an everlasting guarantee.
In 2020, the pandemic taught the world that there was no such thing as a guarantee.
When commutes shortened to a mere five steps from the bed to the couch, there was no one to buy chicken and rice in the shadows of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. When tourism plummeted amid travel advisories and shutdowns of the city’s most popular attractions, there was no one to purchase hot dogs outside of the Met. And without anyone to serve, few street vendors saw any sense in trying to sell soft pretzels to empty sidewalks.
First, the hope of returning to routine within a week or two faded. Then went the notion that the world would ever again resemble its pre-pandemic normal. And nearly two years after the COVID-19 outbreak began to dismantle the status quo, street vendors are still struggling to recover enough business to make a decent living.
The winter has always been a particularly challenging time for those who rely on customers’ willingness to eat food while exposed to the elements. There’s nothing that compares to the coziness of indoor dining on a brumal December evening, but chowing down under the glow of a heat lamp still promises more comfort than fighting through numb fingers on a park bench. And heading into the upcoming months, a chronically sluggish return to office life and the uncertainty accompanying the omicron variant further weaken the opportunity for offseason success.
As the tamale sellers and hot dog cart owners who have been so crucial to shaping the vibrant character of New York face the next links in an unbroken chain of adversity, the city continues to offer very little support in return for the vendors’ thankless work.
Stepping up where the city has not, the Street Vendor Project attempts to serve as a lifeline for the entrepreneurs who push their carts through sleet and stand under the sweltering summer sun to satisfy the stomachs of hungry pedestrians.
The membership-based project is part of the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of marginalized individuals and fights for systemic change in New York City. Rallying behind the motto of “Vendor Power,” the Street Vendor Project has campaigned for lowering fines for minor violations, lifting the restrictive cap on mobile food vendor permits, and increasing the amount of public space available to vendors.
Recognizing the unprecedented burdens that the pandemic dumped onto its members, many of whom are immigrants and people of color, the Street Vendor Project launched several initiatives over the past two years to provide indispensable assistance. Relief funding from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation allowed the Street Vendor Project to pay out-of-work food cart operators to cook free meals for New Yorkers in need, and a partnership with Morgan Stanley and the Robin Hood Foundation delivered nearly $2.4 million to thousands of vendors across the city.
Most recently, the Street Vendor Project sought support for the street vendor community through a monthlong scavenger hunt. A series of objectives encouraged foodies to traverse the five boroughs during the NYC Street Vendor Scavenger Hunt, patronizing businesses that have been hurting for customers since the start of the pandemic and trying out food carts and menu items that they may have otherwise overlooked.
Even outside of the pandemic, the plight of street vendors has remained an unfortunate constant throughout the industry’s centuries-long history in New York City.
Early accounts of pushcart peddlers painted a nostalgic picture of their congregations on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, maintaining the drabness of the streets surrounding the city’s tenement buildings was much improved by the colorful animation of the bustling business workers and those who purchased their wares. “Picturesque” was the adjective that journalists employed time and time again to describe those gatherings at which immigrants kept both their cultural traditions and the spark of the city alive.
But in 1905, mounting complaints of congestion led to the appointment of a commission to investigate the “pushcart problem.” The resulting report, published one year later, determined that the proposed solution of indoor markets would be a poor substitute for the peddlers who traveled to accommodate the tenement house population and that tightening documentation requirements would “subvert the very intention and reason for permitting this industry to be carried on.” Moreover, the commission found that the food sold by street vendors was at a higher calibre than that which was sold in neighboring stores.
Still, a level of opposition disproportionate to the commission’s conclusions remained.
One of the strongest voices of disapproval was that of Fiorello La Guardia, who served as the mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1945. Fueled by an obsession with transforming peddlers into clean-cut merchants who would be quiet and courteous at all times, La Guardia was successful in banning vendors from selling merchandise on the streets. He pushed those who could afford it into indoor markets; those who didn’t have enough money to rent a stall were left unemployed.
“I have found you pushcart peddlers, and I have made you merchants,” La Guardia declared at the opening of an indoor market, according to one witness.
As the 1905 commission predicted, the indoor markets failed to attract the volume of business as the outdoor gatherings once had. Old women still wanted peddlers to stop outside their homes and refused to walk to the markets, and immigrants who had been motivated largely by nostalgia to support the peddlers were uninterested in indoor recreations.
Merchants on Orchard Street, initially eager to remove the peddlers positioned outside of their shops, realized that they had misjudged their supposed competition. Without the peddlers present to attract potential shoppers, they reported a 60% reduction in gross sales.
Despite La Guardia’s best attempts to push peddlers indoors, the streets of New York City never fully emptied of vendors. The next major blow to their operations came in the early ‘80s, when a restrictive cap was placed on the number of available mobile vendor permits, effectively making it impossible for vendors to obtain them going forward. The city would issue just 2,900 citywide permits that allowed year-round vending on public streets in every borough; 100 of them would be set aside for veterans. In addition, there would be 1,000 seasonal permits, 200 borough-specific permits, and 1,000 Green Cart permits for vendors selling whole fruits and vegetables only.
Separately, general merchandise vending licenses were capped at 853.
Demand rapidly outpaced the number of permits, and the unmoving waitlist of vendor hopefuls reached capacity and closed in 2007. Vendors could either risk operating without a permit, a violation that carries a standard fine of $1,000, or pay up to $25,000 for a two-year vending permit on the black market. (Issued by the city, permits would cost vendors just $200 every two years.)
For nearly four decades, 5,100 remained a hard limit for mobile food vending permits in New York City. Already a suffocating constraint before COVID-19, the cap became even more impractical when the pandemic left undocumented immigrants unemployed and unable to seek financial assistance from the government. Faced with minimal options, thousands of immigrants set out to make a living in any way they could. For many, that was street vending.
When mass protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020 prompted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to pledge a reduction in police funding. He announced the New York City Police Department would no longer handle street vendor enforcement.
His words offered a glimmer of hope to vendors who had reported threats, harassment, and cruel treatment at the hands of the NYPD. According to accounts from multiple vendors, officers frequently threatened exorbitant fines in excess of the $1,000 maximum for vending without a permit. Hui Jun Wang, an immigrant from China’s Henan province who opened a brick-and-mortar restaurant to avoid high permit costs on the black market, described to Curbed how her son frequently suffered from nightmares following an incident of police harassment.
Officers also showed little to no hesitation when it came to confiscating products. Heleodora Vivar Flores, a street vendor from Mexico who has served on the board of the Street Vendor Project, told Prism that police officers would put bleach in vendors’ containers to render it unfit for consumption.
In late January, advocates of lifting the cap received some payoff for their efforts when the New York City Council voted in favor of Intro 1116-B. Under the new legislation, the city will release 400 new permits a year for the next decade, nearly doubling the amount available. The bill also dictated the Department of Consumer and Worker Protections (DCWP) would assume responsibility for street vendor enforcement efforts.
The release of any additional permits is a clear success guaranteed to bring relief and freedom to all who receive one of the 4,000 available over the next 10 years. But the fight is not over. The Street Vendor Project estimates that there are anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 street vendors currently working in New York City, so the updated limit would still push thousands of vendors toward overpriced permits on the black market.
Bills seeking unlimited mobile food vending permits have faced opposition from brick-and-mortar restaurants and storefronts, as well as from local Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) who claim that street vendors take up too much sidewalk space and create unfair competition.
Conversely, street vendors are constantly contending with complicated sidewalk restrictions, closed blocks, and obstructions placed in previously held positions. As the now-permanent Open Streets program across the city has bestowed outdoor space to restaurants maneuvering indoor dining restrictions, street vendors have found finding a spot to be an even greater challenge.
Enforcement has remained an issue as well. After the DCWP began conducting inspections on June 1, they issued 424 tickets for violations in the three-month period that followed. For comparison, the NYPD issued an average of 402 civil vending summonses each quarter in 2019. The DCWP stood behind their actions, pointing out the 4,177 complaints that the department had received since January, many of which came from community boards and BIDs.
And contrary to de Blasio’s word, the NYPD continued their campaign against street vendors. Over the summer, police officers responded to a call from business owners in the Bronx complaining about unlicensed vendors blocking the sidewalk and drew criticism for ejecting them from the block. In September, an uproar resulted from a video of the Department of Sanitation tossing another Bronx street vendor’s fruit supply into a trash truck.
During the scavenger hunt, the Street Vendor Project awarded 400 points to each team who called their New York state assembly member and asked them to support Assembly Bill A5081A, which would lift all caps on permits and licenses and decriminalize street vending.
There were also challenges that taught participants about the current state of vending. A task called “Freedom of Expression'' explained under the First Amendment, sidewalk sellers peddling artwork, crafts, books, music, or any printed material do not need a permit.
To score 200 points, a team member needed to request a custom creation from a street artist. A follow-up mission explained that Muslim incense vendors often invoke the First Amendment for protection, claiming their merchandise is a form of religious expression. A photo of a vendor selling incense was also worth 200 points.
Other assignments educated players on pivotal figures throughout street vendor history. One trivia question asked about the unusual object that Lillian Harris Dean, a famous Black street vendor known as “Pig Foot Mary,” used to sell her hog maws and chitterlings. (The answer: A baby carriage, purchased for $3 in 1901.) Another introduced “The Oyster King of New York,” an abolitionist and restaurant owner by the name of Thomas Downing who got his start peddling oysters on the streets of New York City in the 19th century.
Purely for fun, teams also had to find items like a one-handed snack, a turkey-based dish in honor of Thanksgiving, and poinsettias for Christmas, with photo documentation required for all.
When it comes to taking pictures of street vendors, Maxwell Schiano is the guy to talk to.
For the last few years, Schiano, from behind his camera, has immersed himself in a world that he admits he previously took for granted.
Food carts are so synonymous with New York City that they’re often ignored. Not even in a negative way, but just because they’re there on every single corner,” the photographer said.
His project, half documentary — half art piece, began outside of the Fifth Avenue Apple store in the middle of the night. There, Schiano found himself face-to-face with a moment of captivating beauty made all the more enchanting by the sight’s unexpected ability to stop him in his tracks. If a New Yorker became lost in the depths of the desert, it’s very possible that the mirage greeting them in their homesick stupor would be precisely the scene in Schiano’s photograph — the otherworldly glow of a Sabrett hot dog truck keeping the promise of “the city that never sleeps” alive after most have fallen asleep.
That single shot inspired Schiano to embark on an extended period of exploration on the streets of the city, focusing his lens on the halal food trucks and fresh fruit stands so typical of the quintessential Manhattan corner.
In January 2020, Schiano announced via Instagram caption his intention to turn his food cart photographs into a zine, only for the pandemic to interfere with his original plans a short two months later. Soon, the vendors in his photos were masked; so, too, were the customers gazing upon the menus affixed to the sides of trucks.
By the fall, the zine, titled “New York City Vibe, Volume One,” was available for pre-order. All of the proceeds, Schiano announced, would go to the Street Vendor Project.
Much like the food truck that unexpectedly captured his attention back at the start of the project, the success of the zine took Schiano by surprise.
It’s sold almost 500 copies, and I’ve raised over $5,000 for the Street Vendor Project,” Schiano said.
An additional five copies of Schiano’s zine were awarded as a prize for the best photo taken during the NYC Street Vendor Scavenger Hunt. Scavenger hunt winners were announced at a closing ceremony on Dec. 16, and prizes for other categories included a distillery tasting session, a gift certificate for dinner at the food-cart-turned-restaurant Arepa Lady, and a food tour of Queens with Culinary Backstreet.
The food tour was given to the hunt’s top team, along with a commemorative trophy. That honor went to a team called “Cloudy With A Chance of Matzah Balls,” who, with a total of 15,273 points, blew away the rest of the competition. The same group also raised $2,330 to walk away with a second award for the fundraising champion.
Throughout the ceremony, Street Vendor Project staff and board members expressed to attendees the impact of their contributions.
We love you,” said Kele Nikhereanye, a food justice advocate who came to New York City from Lesotho at the age of 13. “Vendors are happy that you were able to learn about them, and so, thank you all for participating.
There may be no song as iconic in its celebration of New York City as “New York, New York.” Its lyrics paint an exultant picture of New York, calling upon a then-decades-old phrase to further immortalize the reputation of “the city that never sleeps.” Food trucks truly embody the city’s nickname with their willingness to serve cheese fries to clubgoers stumbling out onto the streets at 4 a.m. and donuts to early morning commuters headed to their posts before the sun has even reached its own.
The song continues: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”
Again, the street vendors prove the accuracy of the theme song written for the Martin Scorsese film of the same name through their strength to persevere in spite of the insurmountable obstacles that often threaten to block their pathway to success, or even stability. There’s little question as to whether or not the determination and willpower of the city’s vendors would carry them far if they did choose to leave the city, no matter where they decided to go.
But there begs the question — does “making it” in New York City need to be so difficult?
Do street vendors need to work, as a 2015 report found, over 11 hours a day for more than five days a week to be able to feed their families? Does their chance at prosperity need to be obstructed by an incessant onslaught of restrictions, fines, and harassment? Do they need to be so limited in their ability to legally sell their food and merchandise on the city's sidewalks that the black market becomes the only viable option? Does the mistake of a food cart situated just an inch too far from the curb need to extinguish a vendor's hard-earned profit?
Like the cart that must be parked ever so precisely on the corner, the livelihood of a street vendor is often in a precarious position. And as the pandemic proceeds to push vendors, who contribute so much to the exuberant tapestry of New York City without due acknowledgment, closer to the edge, it's more crucial than ever that those who may have previously taken their presence for granted offer increased support.
