The corner of Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, smells just like you would expect on a warm Saturday morning: salt, wet concrete, something living, and something recently dead. Blue crabs scramble sideways over one another in wooden bins that are overflowing. Behind a table of whole striped bass, a fishmonger wearing a full rubber apron moves his hands quickly and speaks more quickly. Consumers close in, pointing, haggling, sometimes shaking their heads and turning to leave, only to come back thirty seconds later. It’s noisy. It’s disorganized. Almost no other food market in this city is able to be as vibrant as this one.
The people standing ankle-deep in ice water behind those bins sense it more than anyone else, but something is subtly changing beneath all of this activity.
The fishmongers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens’ Chinatowns have endured a great deal. Health scares, bureaucratic pressure, supply chain chaos, and the particular American suspicion of markets that look like real food rather than something vacuum-sealed and labeled. A bacterial outbreak linked to multiple fish markets in Chinatown made headlines in 2014, prompting authorities to advise customers to wear gloves when handling raw, whole fish. Small cuts allowed the bacteria, Mycobacterium marinum, to enter the skin; in the first report, the number of affected individuals was about thirty, but it was later revised to closer to sixty-six. The coverage wasn’t very attractive. However, the markets made it through.
Invisible things are more difficult to survive. For years, the Chinatown neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan have seen a steady increase in rent, pushing out the low-margin businesses that fish markets are nearly always. Rarely does gentrification arrive with a wrecking ball. It is delivered as a juice bar. Next, a small hotel. Next, a landlord discovers that the building’s value has tripled from ten years ago. The fishmonger who has been working on that corner for twenty-five years simply watches his lease renewal come back at an absurd amount without receiving any official notice that the neighborhood is changing.
Additionally, there is the regulatory pressure that has been steadily increasing for decades. Small-market customs, where fish are sold whole and alive and handled by human hands with little ceremony, are awkwardly positioned on top of federal and state food safety regulations, which are mainly focused on mass industrial production. The regulations aren’t always incorrect. However, because they are designed for a different type of market, applying them consistently tends to have a greater negative impact on small operators than on large distributors.
What these markets actually offer is frequently overlooked in these discussions. Not just fish, though the fish is exceptional, sourced through networks that extend from the Bronx’s Fulton Fish Market, the second-largest fish market in the world after Tokyo, to local supply chains that have been in operation for generations. They offer a gathering spot, a culinary culture, and a sort of sensory education about the origins of dinner. No refrigerated display case can duplicate the experience of a customer at a Chinatown stall sorting through a bin of live crabs, weighing one in each hand, and making a decision.
It’s difficult to ignore how much of this is hidden from the larger city. While the restaurants are praised by the food press, the markets that supply them are mainly ignored. It is improbable that the fishmongers themselves will conduct interviews or plan campaigns. By nature and situation, they are people who put in a lot of effort and arrive early, but they don’t really expect gratitude.
It’s still genuinely unclear if enough of them will be able to survive in the face of growing rents, stricter laws, and a city that seems more and more geared toward people who don’t really want to smell fish on their street corner. However, none of that is visible on a Saturday morning in Sunset Park. The crabs continue to scramble. The aprons remain damp. Additionally, someone’s grandmother continues to receive the exact fish she requested.
