Washington Market In 1946

In January 1946, acting on complaints from retailers about black market operations, inspectors from the Office of Price Administration paid a visit to Washington Market posing as retailers. The complaining retailers had been unwilling to finger their suppliers by name. The New York Times reported that the jobbers in their stalls “hemmed in by walls of boxes and crates higher than a man's head” had never met customers with such little sales resistance, willing to pay $5.50 for a bag of onions and accepting a bogus receipt for the ceiling price of $2.80 or agreeing to tie-in sales which required them to buy produce that was in over-supply and had no ceiling prices, like cabbage or turnips, in order to purchase scarcer, controlled items like onions. Seven corporations and three individuals were summoned to court as a result.

In 1946 the city, state and federal government were looking for ways to make the trip from farm to table shorter and more efficient. Charles Grutzner noted in his Sunday Times Magazine feature that this was less of a concern twenty-five years earlier when the market mostly handled staples like potatoes, turnips and cabbage, which were the vegetables on which most people subsisted most of the year when everyone was a locavore by necessity. Back then broccoli was unheard of and other perishables “such as berries, citrus fruits, lettuce, tomatoes, grapes and peaches were market rarities.” The problem of freshness was particularly acute over the weekends when the market was closed. In April representatives of the food growers, with support of the wholesalers and tentatively from the Teamsters Union, pending overtime concessions, were looking to keep the market open six days a week.

Meanwhile the city proposed building and operating a new, modernized Washington Market on the site. But recently elected Mayor O'Dwyer, former Mayor LaGuardia, upstate Republican representatives in the state legislature, dealers, wholesalers, retailers and teamsters tangled over who should be represented on the commission that would run the market and to whom they would be answerable. Two decades later the whole operation would be transferred to Hunts Point, a remote part of the Bronx. Much of the former location stood as a deserted, partially demolished wasteland until Tribeca emerged in the 1980s.