Vendors Vie With Greenmarket For Space

By Nick Pinto
POSTED APRIL 1, 2008

One by one, the food vendors approached the microphone in the St. John’s University auditorium last month and, in faltering English, pleaded their cases.

“I’ve worked in this place a long time, but the Greenmarket came last year and told me I have to move,” Mohammed Ali told the meeting of Community Board 1 on March 24. “Please, help me.”

Ali and nearly a dozen other vendors who do a brisk lunch business at Zuccotti Park, located at Broadway and Cedar Street, are being moved by farmers who themselves were displaced on Sept. 11 from their long-time spot outside the World Trade Center.

When the farmers were granted use of Zuccotti Park for two days a week last year, they displaced the carts of food vendors, many of whom have staked a claim to the same stretch of sidewalk for decades.

“I have been in this spot since 1996,” said Fikry Ahmen, an Egyptian-born Queens resident who sells grilled food to the lunchtime crowds. “This is my only job. I pay my taxes. Why must I go?”

Last year, police were called several times to settle disputes over sidewalk space. In one incident, police seized the cart of one of the vendors.

“The police never listen to us,” Ahmen said. “We are right, but we are very weak.”

Greenmarket organizers see it differently, however.

“We have a street activity permit,” said Greenmarket director Michael Hurwitz. “We have DOT approval. We are there by the will of the community.”

The market has already been moved twice, Hurwitz said, and it has already shrunk from 15 tents down to seven. Moreover, he said, the Greenmarket is a more important use of the space.

“We're not just a business like they are,” Hurwitz said. “Eighty-five percent of our farmers would be out of business if they didn’t have the opportunity to sell here, which would mean that their farms could be developed, which would mean that the city would lose our local food network. There’s just more at stake.”

The Greenmarket is only at the park two days a week, between April and December. And while the Greenmarket’s permit restricts the farmers to Zuccotti Park, Hurwitz says, the vendors’ licenses allow them to move all over the city.

But the vendors say they have few options. They are banned from most Lower Manhattan sidewalks. And because they depend almost exclusively on local office-worker’s lunch traffic, they only have five days of work to support themselves and their families.

The vendors and the Greenmarket agree that an optimal solution would be for the farmers to set up on the opposite side of the park.

But Brookfield Properties, which owns the park and One Liberty Plaza across the street, says it doesn’t want the Greenmarket to set up there. Melissa Coley, a spokeswoman for Brookfield Properties, said the company won’t allow any use of the sidewalk on the north side of the park, along Liberty Street.

“We are opposed to anything that interferes with people’s ability to use and enjoy the park,” Coley said.  “We renovated the park several years ago at a cost of $8 or 10 million, and we want it to be free and open to public use.”

After hearing the vendors’ pleas, some board members were taken aback.

“It should be absolutely unacceptable to us for Brookfield or the city or anybody else to say to us that you can have one or the other when it’s obvious to us that we can have both,” said Jeff Galloway. “We want this Greenmarket, but it’s just absolutely outrageous to displace these people and destroy their livelihood.”

CB1 voted to approve the Greenmarket’s return to Zuccotti Park, but included an amendment urging the market not to displace the vendors.

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