Contending with Vending: Trials and Tales of Pushcart Warriors

Written by Benjamin Galynker

Feature
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. For anyone who’s seen the streets and sidewalks of Manhattan, such images are somewhat familiar to us, even decades later, in the 21st Century. However, much has changed in the street vending world in the past 80 years.

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. If you took no notice of them, except to buy a pretzel or a pair of sunglasses, we’ll tell you something you might have already sensed: most of today’s street vendors feel just as foreign as the Jews who populated the sidewalks of this country a century ago.

We wonder the same thing about our own ancestors as we do about the street vendors of today: why do so many immigrants go the way of street carts to win the daily bread? As Mohammed, a Bangladeshi hot dog vendor most recently located on Liberty Street told my colleague, he has “no degree,” did not go to college, and has “nothing…no, nothing.” In “New York City, you [must be] qualified [for a] good job,” he said. Without “skills” in reading and English, it is impossible, he said, to find a good job. Like Mohammed, many vendors arrive in America and are willing to work hard to make a reasonable living.

Khalid, an Egyptian coffee vendor on Wall Street got into the business through family members who are already involved. Some vendors “graduate” to being taxi drivers when their English becomes good enough and others, like Khalid, dream of one day “opening up a store or something,” but for the time being, vending is “the only thing available” because he lacks money, which “can get you to do anything, anything in the sky.”

Location, Location, Location

As all of the three-dozen or so vendors with whom we spoke reported, the vending life improves as a vendor gains regular customers and saves enough money to buy her own cart. She gains some power within the vending world the longer she stays in the game, 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. Vendors across the city agree that securing a profitable and sustainable vending location is probably the single thorniest part of the business. And though the bureaucracy is constantly shifting, the dynamics of the vendor-customer relationship have not changed much in a century.

Most vendors, like the peddlers that came before them, cannot lug their carts long distances. Their customers, regardless of social status, reach them by foot, in the same location every day. Then, like now, customers walked past the vendors, bought something small, and returned if the service was good. Whereas the peddlers of our great grandparents' generation were barred from staying in one location for any significant amount of time and, therefore, pushed their carts around the same block all day, today’s vendors must sort through several decades of legislation that regulates their livelihoods.

Run-ins With the Law

According to Suzanne Wasserman of the Gotham Center for New York City History, 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. Over time, the vendors slowly crept back and opted for automobile-free sidewalks.

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 best aspects of the laws kept the walking space on sidewalks from getting blocked by vendors and helped to ensure that the food prepared on permitted carts was safe to eat. The worst aspects, though, did not mesh well with the reality of being a vendor. 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. Forty years after the Hester Street pioneers, the City Council finally legalized the practice of vending in the same place on the street every day. The practice of keeping anti-vendor laws on the books long after they have outlived their usefulness—if that usefulness ever existed in the first place—was one of the reasons that Sean Basinski started the Street Vendor Project (SVP).

SVP offers legal assistance to vendors who’ve been indicted, both legitimately and not. Mohammed, for example, told us that police officers are constantly ticketing him. They would “always say private property,” he said, even though the official city maps show the sidewalk where he vends to be public property.

To illustrate the difficulties described by Mohammed, 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. In 2005, the Health Department lottery for the 3000 full-year permits didn’t even happen because the permits were already renewed by already established vendors.

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.

But, as Monty Python put it, there’s a snag, you see. 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, and neither would lowly interns like myself. It would further save city resources if the government physically marked places on the sidewalk where it makes sense for a vendor to set up. If a vendor and her customers are neither blocking traffic nor causing a fire hazard, what does it matter if the edge of a food vendor’s cart is only nine feet from a subway entrance?

Fines and Misdemeanors

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, which leaves you considerably less money for food and rent. And once you’re accused of being in an illegal spot, regardless of the customer base you’ve amassed, the police could keep giving you notices of violation with $100 or even $1000 fines until you moved.

We were struck by the irony that the high fines themselves lessoned the chances that vendors would move from illegal spots, since vendors need to have money to pay off the fines, and the only way to have enough money to pay off high fines is to continue to work in the same illegal, but lucrative, spot. In this high-stakes game, it is nearly impossible for vendors to vend in a lucrative spot undisturbed, pay taxes, and make an honest living, without getting fined.

The logic behind the monetary penalty system is that if one place gets you fined repeatedly, you will be deterred from returning to that spot. Unfortunately, this is an inaccurate and even naïve view because it wrongly assumes that vendors can easily move from one place to another and continue to make money. In reality, it is nearly impossible for a vendor to move far from an established spot and still make the same money as before. Because of the difficulty of building up a substantial clientele, vendors who are forced to move generally stay as close by as possible.

It is unlikely that the police officers, who are also struggling to make a living, will grow sympathetic towards the vendors’ predicaments. They could, however, penalize in proportion to the gravity of the violation. If vendors are considered obstructions, then we must put their level of obstruction in the context of obstructions that New Yorkers confront all the time: telephone booths, outdoor cafes, each other. In our estimation, whether the vendor is ten or twenty feet from a doorway doesn’t make much difference, and if the law doesn’t change to reflect that, then the enforcement should.

The fines system should change as well, since the fines do not deter vendors from vending, but rather throw them into staggering debt that they cannot afford pay off. The first step towards solving this problem is to ask the vendors themselves what can be done. A map of legal spots should be combined with a debt forgiveness program, by which the city forgives certain violations if the vendor proves that she has moved into a legal spot. As it is, the city has implemented a debt repayment program that effectively encourages the vendor to go back to her illegal spot in order to repay the debt as fast as possible.

Complete debt forgiveness, in exchange for documenting one’s move to a legal spot, would foster more understanding between vendors and the city. It would also mean that more immigrants could fulfill their belief that hard work, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a strong commitment to customer service are valued and rewarded in this most universal of adopted homes. As my own great grandfather probably did countless times during his vending career, Mohammed refuted the suggestion that he would leave the United States. “No,” he said, “I like America…America [is a] good country, [with a] good future, everything. But these tickets…this city [causes] big problems for me right now.”

___
Special thanks to Sean Basinski, Director of the Street Vendor Project, for giving me the opportunity to learn from and advocate for New York City Street Vendors. Additional thanks to Suzanne Wasserman, Associate Director of the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York, whose generosity with her research on Lower East Side street vendor history has made this article possible. Thanks also to Ryan Devlin, of the Street Vendor Project, doctoral student at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the UC Berkeley, who conducted the interviews quoted in this piece.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.