Latest pushcart picture: "Frankfurt"

Paul's getting closer and closer to the debut of "Uncle Shlomo's Pushcart" - the permits are mostly in order, he's got a place to hawk his wares, and he's bought stock to put on the cart. I can't wait. I did this picture yesterday and this morning.


Technorati Tags: art, pushcart, uncle+shlomo

In which Uncle Shlomo's pushcart almost gets launched.

Uncle Shlomo's nephew Paul thought he'd take the pushcart out for a maiden voyage this weekend at the Carrboro Music Festival, so Bob and I spent hours getting it ready. I spent most of four days painting this pushcart, it shouldn't have taken so long but I never did one before.

We've had a good laugh trying to compute how many hours we have in this project (i.e. how much we'd have to charge somebody for a pushcart). It was loads of fun. (As always, click on the picture for a larger view.)


But in the end, Paul couldn't secure the permits in time. I was completely crushed. Oh, well! This will give him more time to figure out what he wants to sell from it.

Technorati Tags: pushcart, vending

Bob builds the pushcart!

Assuaging my misery from the chicken slaughter, Bob began the pushcart while I was gone. He took these wheels, which were handmade for me by Witmer Coach Shop...


And the leftover hickory from the pieces of wood we bought for Jethro's collar and this stool...


And this picture for a model ...


And Bob built the pushcart...


And gave it hickory handles!


.

Problems for pushcart vendors in the 21st century.

Extracts from
Contending with Vending: Trials and Tales of Pushcart Warriors
by Benjamin Galynker
You’ve seen the pictures: Hester Street, or maybe Orchard, teeming with vendors hawking food and bric-a-brac; the flashback in "The Godfather, Part II," where young Vito Corleone, fresh off the boat, walks past an old man, mule-like, pulling his wooden fruit cart behind him...

In 1920, seventy-five percent of the vendors in New York City were Jewish, and another 20 percent were Italian.

Today there are almost no Jews and Italians, but plenty of Senegalese, Bangladeshi, Chinese, and Egyptians.

Some vendors "graduate" to being taxi drivers when their English becomes good enough and others dream of one day "opening up a store or something."

The vending life improves as a vendor gains regular customers and saves enough money to buy her own cart... and works up to the more prominent and lucrative locations.

Sidewalk real estate is a hot market and demands from vendors long-term strategizing and extraordinary patience.

The unreasonable 1920s prohibition on parking one’s cart was challenged by four enterprising Eastern-European Jewish pushcart vendors who joined forces and flouted the peddling laws, in the first documented vendor rebellion. They rolled their carts off the sidewalk and parked on Hester Street proper, right in the middle of the bustling Lower East Side thoroughfare. They became the first bona fide street vendors and hundreds more followed suit.

The reign of the street vendors ended abruptly, after Napoleonic Mayor LaGuardia, who served from 1934 to 1945, ordered them into indoor markets at the urging of the shopkeepers, who saw the vendors as unfair competition. After a short while, though, the very shopkeepers who despised the vendors lost so much business as a result of their dispersal that they pleaded, unsuccessfully, with LaGuardia for the vendors’ return.

In the decades after the LaGuardia fiasco, the City Council and its administrative agencies produced a patchwork of laws that systematized—and stigmatized—vendors.

The new laws were difficult for even a legally savvy citizen to follow, and they were equally difficult to enforce in a non-biased way.

For many years, police officers continued to drag vendors into the criminal courts to levy fines against them for standing still, even after stationary vending became commonplace and pushcart peddling became rare.

Consider the seemingly straightforward task of finding a "legal spot" on which to build your vending business. Let’s say your handmade jewelry business fits on a one-foot-by-one-foot square table and you plan to staff it from a one-foot-by-one-foot stool. When you try to apply for a general -- as opposed to food—vending -- license, you find that there are no licenses to be had -- the City Council froze the number of licenses at 853 in 1979, and you can’t even get on the waiting list because it’s so long.

To make matters worse, even if you could get a license, you wouldn’t be able to open your two-square-foot business anywhere in the 280-square-block area of midtown Manhattan.

Since you can’t sell your jewelry, let’s say that you become the proud owner of a burrito grilling cart, eight feet long and three feet wide. Now let’s assume that the city, in its infinite wisdom, enters into a contract with a business improvement program, as it often does, to place designer plants and artistic trash baskets at 7.5 foot intervals throughout the midtown neighborhood where your customers work. This time, you are able to get a license to vend food fairly easily, since there is no limit to those licenses, but you can’t get a permit for your cart.

For argument’s sake, though, let’s just say you somehow entered the lottery and got a permit. Unlike your failed jewelry business, this burrito cart takes up quite a bit of space. And since the only lucrative spots are at intersections, that’s where you want to be.

While food vendors deal with physical spots, regulations deal with arbitrary distances from objects whose layout changes with every street. In effect, the regulations nearly outlaw doing business anywhere near an intersection. They require that vendors be on a sidewalk at least 12 feet wide, at least 10 feet from any crosswalk and subway, at least 20 feet from any entrance, and not "within a bus stop."

The problem with these rules is that they are not actually graphed out on a street map, so neither vendors nor police officers know which spots are legal. If you walk the streets of Manhattan, you will see a handful of vendors who have been working for ten years and have found the Holy Grail—a corner spot that meets all the city’s regulations.

But the coveted spot doesn’t come cheap. Most of these vendors worked for someone in that spot for years and then paid that person, perhaps $8,000, for the privilege of taking over the spot full-time.

Since food vendors have carts whose designs are specifically approved by the city, the city knows exactly what sizes the carts are and could easily diagram a street map of legal spots. That way, vendors and police officers wouldn’t have to get out their tape measures and cameras and fight about whether a vendor has found a legal spot.

The result of having such stringent but arbitrary bright lines separating legal from illegal conduct is that all vendors start to feel like vending is a borderline criminal behavior. One false move, and the city hits you with three $50 fines, all at once.

Fines do not deter vendors from vending, but rather throw them into staggering debt that they cannot afford to pay off.

.

Technorati Tags: pushcarts, vending, city

In which we meet the "Last Pushcart Vendor in New York."

After our visit to the last pushcart, which is now parked beside a porta-potty and is used to shuffle garbage cans around, we went to the Essex street market to meet Jeffrey the butcher, who bills himself as the last pushcart vendor still standing.

Jeffrey has a very high-tech website. He is a really cheerful guy who appears to adore his work, is very proud to be a fourth-generation butcher, and was butterflying chicken breasts by the score when we showed up.

He explained that when he was a tot, his grandfather would hoist him up onto the back of the pushcart and give him a bag of cherries to eat, and little Jeffrey would hawk meat for his grandfather.

So naturally I asked, "well, where ARE all the pushcarts?" and he tossed me a butcher's apron and said, "Come on back here, I'll tell you."

In 1936 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia decided pushcarts made the city look bad. Who knew how old that produce was? Were the merchants short-weighting? Haggling was unseemly. And were they paying their taxes?

In addition, the merchants of Hester, Essex, Delancy, and Mulberry Streets (and all the other streets with lines of elbow-to-elbow pushcarts just parallel to the sidewalks) were indignant that pushcart vendors, who did not pay rent beyond a 25-cents-per-day rental fee (they went every morning to the pushcart stables to sign out a pushcart) could compete with them so flagrantly.

La Guardia took a giant pot of federal money and built a ring of indoor markets around the boroughs. He gave every pushcart vendor a "bin number" and a permit at a particular market. Jeffrey's family, obviously, got their bin number at the Essex Street Market, where he still operates.

He says each guy was given two weeks to sell out whatever stock he had and after that, he could only sell whatever he had a permit for. AND: "As each pushcart guy wheeled up to the market, his pushcart was taken away. La Guardia had them all destroyed."

The irony was: within a year the storekeepers realized they'd made a terrible mistake, their sales were down 60%. It turns out that virtually all the people coming to buy from the pushcart vendors were former Lower East Siders, come back from their more affluent current homes to savor a nostalgic visit to the old home. They LIKED to haggle. They LIKED the noise and the tumult and the mishmosh of goods for sale.

When the pushcarts were gone and the street was nice and sterile, there was no draw and the tourists stayed home.

Of course this is the eternal puzzle of city life. The folks in charge want everything to be clean, predictable, well-regulated. That makes for a boring city and drives the tourists away.

I was a busker in Harvard Square back in the 1970s when the powers-that-be decided busking (and street vending of baubles and bongs) was unseemly. They tried banning, they tried regulation and permits, and the result was, the tourists didn't like Harvard Square so much any more. What a surprise.

Technorati Tags: pushcart, street+vending, cityscape,

In which we find the last pushcart in Manhattan

I have a friend thinking of going into the pushcart vendor business, and since my main purpose in life is to be other peoples' muse, I've gone into high investigative mode.


I went to Manhattan to visit my daughter Hannah one last time before she moves to California and, knowing her mother very well, she did quite a bit of research when I asked her "please find me a real pushcart I can look at and photograph."

I really didn't think it would be that hard. I read The Pushcart War to my kids when they were little, and figured since there used to be 1,000s of pushcarts, surely there should be hundreds left.

Not so. As Hannah described her search:

I like this project. Pushcarts are in my genes. So I thought tracking one down would be easy...

Museum of the City of New York: "Nope, no pushcarts - try the Tenement Museum."

Tenement Museum: "We have a replica in our gift shop, we keep books on it, but no, we don't have any originals."

New York Historical Society: "No, we don't have one. They're ... yeah, they're kind of big to keep around, you know?"

Ellis Island Museum: "Nope."

Oh my goodness! In our zeal for progress, could it really be? Did we manage to throw out all the pushcarts?

In response to her plea (the post was entitled Who's got a pushcart?...

Kate Stober of the Tenement Museum wrote in to say:

Re the pushcarts: the Lower East Side Business Improvement District has at least one or two. You should also talk to Jeffrey the Butcher in the Essex Street Market - he has a crazy story about learning to sell stuff from the last pushcart vendor on the Lower East Side.

I called the Lower East Side Business Improvement District.

"We've got a pushcart," they said. "We don't use it much, but we bring it out for special events."

"Where is it now?" I asked. "Is it in storage?"

"Oh no," they said. "It would take up way too much space in storage. It's in a parking lot on Broome Street."

Aha! We walked over to the parking lot, and there it was. Just a wooden pushcart. They were using it to store garbage cans. We took pictures, to the disbelief of the parking attendant.

And so I present the photos I took, for the benefit of anybody else who'd like to revive this fine profession.

For more about Jeffrey the butcher, see the next post...

Melinama does Illustration Friday: "Wide."

I'm practicing up for painting a pushcart. This is "wide" lettering.



Technorati Tags: Illustration+Friday

The best antique pushcart pictures I've seen.

A new enthusiasm for pushcarts.

A friend of mine is tired of regular jobs and thinking maybe he'd like to be a pushcart peddler. Of course this appeals to me.