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The Market Remembered Dead fish carelessly tossed in the street. Grim faced men straining to push heavy wooden carts through the snow. Decrepit piers jutting into a dirty river.
This rough and tumble place was Barbara Mensch’s backyard. Closed down in 2006 after the city moved it to Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, the fish market had once been one of the largest in the world. When Mensch, a photographer, moved to the South Street area in 1979, making her home in an ancient brick building with a shaky stairwell and walls that were musty and damp, the market was already in decline. But it could still cast a net on the imagination of Mensch. In the next four years she produced a photographic document both historic and artful. “South Street,” a meticulously designed book published this month by Columbia University Press, contains 137 beautifully reproduced photographs by Mensch accompanied by the stories of the colorful men she met and her own, sometimes harrowing, efforts to enter their world. Mensch began photographing the market as it was being investigated by the city for mob control. Outsiders, unwelcome in this tight-knit community where there was always a job for a son or relative, were now treated with profound suspicion. The hostility was “as dense as the fog on the river in the early morning hours,” recalled Mensch. “If I find out you’re a Fed,” one worker told her, “I’ll personally kill ya, myself.”
A testament to the trust that Mensch eventually built with her subjects can be seen in the intimacy of her photographs. Nobody flinches in front of Mensch’s lens. In their portraits, the men stand comfortably in front of her as if posing for a camera was a natural part of the job. The posture of self-confidence, Mensch says in her book, was not uncommon on South Street, where many men found dignity in their work. “Nobody needed a psychiatrist because their job was their worth and to do your job well meant something,” one worker recalled. “They didn’t say, I gotta see a psychiatrist I have no worth in life. I sell fish.”
Mensch’s images are filled with detail. Gnarled hands warming themselves over a fire, a pair of mud-splattered boots, fish hoisted into trucks, thrown, carried, cut apart. Then there are the few acts of rebellion against the Rouse Company—developers of the South Street Seaport Mall that precipitated the market’s closing: a scribbled “we are not going” or “fuck the corporation” on a wall. Mensch was there to photograph the last day of the market. “Signs of the old businesses were torn from the walls and fish bins were thrown onto the curb,” she writes. “The old wooden pallets, office furniture, every hint of the fish market’s existence was dragged out to South Street and broken apart.” “South Street” includes a wonderful introduction by Phillip Lopate, who recounts in detail the market’s long history, including some of the writers who found their muse in it. He describes the new fish market in Hunts Point as having “all the personality of a suburban supermarket warehouse.” Lest future city historians be tempted embrace this comparison and romanticize the old fish market on South Street, let them look at one of Mensch’s best photographs—a man struggling in the snow to push his heavily laden three-wheel cart. His hands are bare, and we can feel the strain of his muscles beneath his snow-covered jacket. Luckily, Mensch was there, too, to make sure that he and those like him will not be forgotten.
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