Mimi Sheraton on Washington Market

Mimi Sheraton wrote of Washington Market in her memoirs Eating My Words and From My Mother's Kitchen. Her father, Joseph Solomon, a wholesale produce grocer, worked more or less normal business hours, leaving his Brooklyn home between 5 and 6 AM for his office in the Washington Market. He was usually home by 6 PM but he was on call in the evening. Truckers would stop at checkpoints along their route to check in as to which market they should head. The Manhattan merchants like Joseph Solomon had agency firms at the markets in Baltimore, DC, Philadelphia, Boston, Newark and, before the war, at Brooklyn's own Wallabout Market, whose Flemish-style buildings were torn down to make way for an expansion of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Solomon would divert trucks from the Washington Market if he could get a better price elsewhere. This was less the case in 1946 when much of the produce was subject to price controls. But some produce that was in abundant supply, like cabbage or turnips, were not controlled or sold at below control price.

As a young girl, Mimi Sheraton sometimes went with her father to his office on weekend mornings when he needed to catch up on his paperwork. Some evenings he would end a family excursion into the city for dinner or a movie with a visit to the market to see how things were going. She remembers the smell of the orangewood crates, crushed lettuce and spinach leaves and the occasional whiff of onion or garlic.

The interiors of the ancient buildings on "The Street" were wobbly and tilted. The narrow wood staircases leading to second floor offices often tipped away from the wall. Her father's office was a maze of levels with leaning desks, hanging green-glass lampshades and golden oak furniture. The bookkeeper in green eyeshades sat at a high, oak counter desk. The office manager was a tough, henna-haired woman with a raucous voice who always wore black dresses with an old red sweater over her shoulders, high heels and chunks of gold jewelery.

Sometimes Mimi joined her father and his friends for lunch at one of the bar and grill taverns in the neighborhood with black and white tile floors, star-etched mirrors, dark wood paneling, bentwood chairs and white tablecloths. The men would start the meal with shots of whiskey and a toast. They ate oysters on the half shell, Yankee bean soup, London broil with mushroom gravy and mashed potatoes, western omelets with home fries, corned beef and cabbage with boiled potatoes, sauerbraten with potato pancakes, calves liver and bacon, and in season, soft shell crabs, smelts and whitebait with oyster crabs.

The WPA Guide to New York City of 1939 said that in addition to the taverns where the business owners ate there were rows of cheap lunchrooms, “tawdry” waterside dive bars and haberdasheries along West Street that catered to the seamen who hung out here. Sometimes those who were unemployed, or “on the beach” as they said, were hired straight from a bar.

Here's a photo of Pete's bar in the Washington Market in 1950.