The Pig Market

In the 1890s Hester Street around Ludlow Street held the Lower East Side's great open-air market, which Jacob Riis called the Pig Market. He thought the name was given in derision, because pork was the one thing nobody sold there. On Thursday nights and Friday mornings, before the Sabbath, pushcarts lined Hester and spilled into the side streets for two or three blocks, selling chickens and geese, eggs, fruit, tin cups, spectacles, hats and suspenders. A New York newspaper in 1898 put the peddlers around Hester, Essex and Norfolk Streets at about fifteen hundred. In 1906 Mayor George McClellan's Push-Cart Commission counted between four and five thousand pushcart peddlers in the city, nearly all of them immigrants, and found Hester among the most crowded of the market streets, with dozens of carts to a block east of Ludlow.

Its conclusions surprised the reformers: the food on the carts was generally as good as, and often better than, the food in the shops nearby, and the remedy it proposed was not abolition but spreading the carts out. The street trade lasted another generation. In January 1940 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia opened the enclosed Essex Street Market a few blocks north, moving hundreds of peddlers indoors as part of his campaign against pushcarts. Hester Street now ends at Essex Street, and the market's busiest block, between Essex and Norfolk, lies under later housing.