The history of street food in New York City is a tapestry woven from the threads of the immigrant experience. Street vending has been a part of the city since at least 1691, when the first regulations on sidewalk vending hit the books. And in the intervening centuries, it’s followed a cyclical pattern of expansion and contraction as allowed by law.
In the earliest days, street food was confined to whole foods like fruits and vegetables as well as other groceries items, rather than meals-on-the-go. Today’s carts and trucks trace their roots to the mid-nineteenth century and the Hot Corn Girls, barefoot and starving teenagers from the city’s immigrant tenement slums who sold roasted hot corn to augment their families’ meager incomes. These young girls unknowingly started a tradition that new immigrants follow to this day, using food vending as a means to make a living and a stepping stone to success.
New York’s food vendors often came from marginalized populations. When the city grew flush with Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, many of the women turned to selling apples in the bustling Financial District, earning the nickname of “Apple Marys.” New York’s two most iconic street foods, the hot dog and the pretzel, were introduced by German immigrants. In 1871 Charles Feltman put a sausage on a bun in Brooklyn and the hot dog was born. Pretzels were originally sold on sticks or out of baskets by poor German women. Vending has even made its mark on the streets themselves—modern day Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan takes its name from bivalve refuse left behind by carts hawking oysters fresh from New York Harbor.
As the city’s population swelled and sprawled, workers could no longer count on returning home during their lunch hour. This difficulty was especially prevalent among the financiers and newspaper writers, who needed quick, convenient lunch spots. Street food vendors popped up along “Newspaper Row” (the modern Park Row) and Wall Street, eager to cater to this new market. On Wall Street, three deluxe food stands appeared across from Jay Cooke & Company, then one of the biggest banks in America. By 1890, the first of Manhattan’s now ubiquitous hot dog carts had begun to vend on Downtown’s Frankfort Street by a man named Louis Haims. He would go on to sell from a window in the now-demolished World Building on Park Row.
In the hot summer months, when New York’s sweltering masses sought a cool, refreshing treat, they bought ice cream on the city streets. The late 19th century peddlers’ calls were a harbinger of today’s noisy ice cream trucks. Vendors in this era sold shallow glasses of ice cream known as penny licks. Customers would lick their portion clean then the vendors reused glasses after a quick water wash. Another “cooling” culinary innovation that can be traced back to pushcart vendors is the ice cream sandwich. One genius Bowery peddler began selling these frozen treats for a penny in 1899, and they quickly became a street food trend.
“A vendor at an accustomed spot becomes a familiar neighborhood asset, part of the community fabric.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, the street food options reflected the diversity of the expanding city and streets in the immigrant enclaves of the Lower East and West Sides teemed with vendors peddling their offerings at daytime markets. The first of these markets began on Hester Street in 1886 with four vendors; by 1920, approximately thirty such markets were in operation. Jewish and German neighborhoods were home to carts selling homemade pickles, hot knishes and pretzels kept in special warming drawers. In an attempt to control and profit from the burgeoning surge of vendors, the city began selling vendor licenses. In 1897 New York boasted 2,000 licensed vendors; by 1917 that number had soared to 7,000.
The street markets would continue well into the twentieth century. During the Great Depression legions of unemployed New Yorkers turned to vending to scrape by. Streets packed with carts could be found throughout Manhattan in the 1930s, including a thriving market in East Harlem where seven hundred licensed carts selling everything from hot yams to buttons could be found along Park Avenue during the summer months. By 1934 there were 14,000 vendors and a growing movement to take the vendors—whose carts frequently created unsafe pedestrian and traffic conditions—off the streets. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and others in power felt that street vending was chaotic and unsanitary. Mayor La Guardia sought to “abolish all itinerant peddling from the streets.” La Guardia, in an effort to move the pushcarts and their customers indoors, opened nine market buildings in 1940 including the Essex Street Market which is still going strong today. The mayor went so far as to ban Good Humor ice cream carts from peddling to children in the seaside community of Rockaway Beach, Queens. With the vendors’ move indoors and the number of licenses reduced to 1,200, ownership of the few outdoor, prepared-food carts slowly shifted from predominantly Jewish and Italian vendors to newer immigrant groups.
The period following World War II brought about massive changes in New York City’s cultural and social dynamics. As upper- and middle-class white New Yorkers fled the metropolis for the suburbs in the post-War boom, their departure was offset by growing populations of Puerto Ricans and African-Americans migrating to New York from the South. Despite this population shift, in this era New Yorkers no longer looked to street vendors to fulfill their increasingly global food cravings. New York street food mostly consisted of hot dogs, Danishes, and coffee; tastier meals could be found at cheap lunch counters around the city. One of the few innovations of this period came when Horn & Hardart, the company behind the automats dotting nearly every block, opened a “Mobile-Mat” in Bryant Park in the summer of 1966. Except it just served the same dishes found directly across the street at another of their automats.
However, New York City and its palate saw another rapid change when the 1965 Immigration Act opened the borders to increased immigration from Asia, southern Europe, and the Caribbean. To find success in their newfound home, the new wave of immigrants did what many generations had done before: they began selling food on the streets. Greeks opened carts selling gyros and souvlaki, grilled chicken and lamb pita sandwiches; with time, they came to own the majority of the working food carts. Their success allowed them to employ other immigrants to actually man the carts. A 1970 New York Times article highlighted the changing demographics of Midtown Manhattan’s far west side neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen, mentioning that food carts depots on West 49th Street from Eighth to Tenth Avenue. Also, a vital street rule had emerged: do not ever compete for the same corner with other vendors from your garage. One popular street food debuted at this time were the candied peanuts now found throughout the city. Latin American cart employees began cooking peanuts in a sweet syrup right on the cart, letting the smell of roasting nuts waft to hungry passersby.
But City Hall and the police department still weren’t willing to allow street food vendors to take over the city. Vendors faced tickets, fines and court battles. The summer of 1977 saw the “Great Hot Dog War,” play out when John Zervas, the “hot dog king” of Central Park, lost his five-year contract with the city. Zervas had paid $80,000 for the right to vend from sixty different locations in Central Park, but after being charged with assault by other vendors, his contract was revoked. In response, Zervas sued the city; his case ended up in State Supreme Court, where his contract was reinstated.
It wasn’t just hot dogs being sold in Central Park anymore. Street food had officially upgraded. By the early 80s, vendors still congregated in areas of high demand, which as in bygone days, meant the financial centers of Downtown and Midtown, with a few areas of high concentration spread throughout Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Sixth Avenue in Midtown, a stretch which remains popular today saw a demand for inexpensive meals after new construction replaced diners with plazas. Vendors gladly rolled in to provide affordable breakfasts and lunches for legions of office workers, including being able get a thick slice of quiche Lorraine for a dollar, with fresh orange juice on the side. In a May 1981 article, even New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton commented on the scene; she advocated picking up the Chinese Fu Manchu stew on the corner of 52nd Street and the fried ground beef kofta from the “Little Afghanistan” cart on West 43rd Street.
By 1982, Mayor Koch’s Office of Operations estimated that ninety percent of the city’s active food peddlers were working in Manhattan south of 59th Street. With that many vendors competing for customers, they had to find ways to be unique. It was around this time that the forerunner of now “standard” chicken over rice dish first appeared. Najib Popal, a refrigerator salesman from Afghanistan vending across from Radio City Music Hall, began grilling marinated chicken thighs, dicing them, and serving them in pitas with lettuce and tomato. On the same corner as Popal, the Egyptian vendor Said Abdelghani sold deep-fried falafel, hummus and baba ghannouj. A few blocks over, you could find a vendor hawking baked potatoes. Chinese carts selling plump pork dumplings, rich scallion pancakes, crispy traditional cookies and even tender roast duck appeared in Chinatown and on 42nd Street, vending items comparable to, and sometimes better than, restaurants occupying the same block.
Just as with Mayor La Guardia and Mayor Koch, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg enacted their own vendor crackdowns. As part of his “quality of life” campaign, Mayor Giuliani enforced restrictions limiting where vendors could sell; parking options were also limited for street vendors depending on foot traffic to find customers, with the busiest areas placed off-limits. Carts came and went as licenses expired and operators moved onto other careers, but by the beginning of the 21st century, morning coffee carts, hot dogs, shish kebabs, and “chicken over rice” carts once again became the rule rather than the exception.
As in years past, many vendors are still newly arrived immigrants, often relying on help from family and friends to maneuver the city’s legal trappings. In 2002, the Urban Justice Center, a non-profit organization that provides legal representation and advocacy to various marginalized groups, started the Street Vendor Project to assist vendors with legal and financial issues, helping them understand their rights, fight unwarranted tickets and heavy fines. In 2005, the Street Vendor Project organized the inaugural Vendy Awards, a fundraiser to support vendor advocacy that has gained renown as “the Oscars of street food.” What started as a small event now draws crowds in the thousands and includes awards for “Best Dessert Vendor” and “Best New Vendor,” in addition to the coveted Vendy Cup.
The Vendys raised the profile of vendors, garnering the lucky finalists local and national media coverage, foodies around the city and abroad began to seek out exceptional carts, reveling in the incredibly good, incredibly cheap food that could be found if you knew where to look. Threads began popping up on sites like Chowhound.com extolling the wonders of the pan-Latin cuisine at the Red Hook soccer fields, or the outstanding lamb shoulder over rice served at the Kwik Meal cart (page 84).
Yet, no one was prepared for the late 2000s. Food trucks and carriages had existed before in and around New York, but social media would change everything for New York’s vendors. As Twitter and Facebook went mainstream and the economy tanked, mobile food flourished. Food trucks and carts could tweet their hours and locations. They were no longer chained to a consistent spot to attract customers and could make use of their wheels, hitting different neighborhoods and cultivating a wider customer base. Specialized trucks and carts serving everything from Belgian waffles and artisanal grilled cheese sandwiches, to schnitzel and seasonal gelato, could find and maintain a following via the internet. Websites jumped on the trend, feeding massive and loyal followings with reviews of new vendors as soon as they hit the streets. While the price point for some of the fancier street food options nudged up considerably, it was still cheaper than dinner out at a sit-down establishment—and for economizing New Yorkers, street food felt like an affordable indulgence.
Despite the growth in street food options the future for New York’s food vendors is uncertain. Vending remains highly regulated, with recent city administrations cherry-picking which regulations they want to enforce and when. The number of licenses for vending is still capped at 1983 levels and the waiting list to get a license from the city is years, perhaps decades, long. Without the option of gaining a license from the city, new vendors must seek out current license holders and “rent” their license on the black market.
Notwithstanding the challenges, there is hope. Vendor run associations like the New York City Food Truck Association have formed to promote and advocate for members to the city government and general public. A number of early-to-market new-wave food trucks like Van Leeuwen Ice Cream (page 180), Treats Truck (page 123), Schnitzel and Things (page 199), and Mexicue (page 194) expanded their presence with brick and mortar locations that complement their trucks, and vice versa. While public support for food trucks is strong, with the high cost of vending and long hours that the business demands, only time will tell which of today’s vendors will still be around to serve the next generation of street food enthusiasts.
