The Fulton Fish Market: A History

Reviewed by Joshua Specht

The Fulton Fish Market: A History
By Jonathan H. Rees
Columbia University Press
November 2022, 312 pp.

Al Smith, past governor of New York state, former President of New York City’s board of Aldermen, and one-time sheriff of New York County came up through the Tammany political machine. His great trick was that though he might have smelled a bit fishy, he was always able to keep himself clean. Perhaps he learned that skill during his time as a young man in New York City’s Fulton Fish Market. Working twelve hours a day left him smelling strongly of the sea, but he managed to clean himself up well enough for political functions, while keeping enough of a whiff of honest work to appeal to the common man. Smith would often say he graduated “cum laude” from “F.F.M.”: Fulton Fish Market.

Whether Fulton was central to Smith’s political education, or just made for a good story, is not entirely clear. But what is clear is how much Fulton Market mattered to the city of New York, the early fishing business in the United States, and later, to the fate of the world’s oceans. This is the story Jonathan Rees traces in his far-ranging book, The Fulton Fish Market: A History.

Fulton Market was established in 1822 and rose to prominence in the ensuing decades. Located south of the Brooklyn Bridge along the East River, it was originally intended to provide all sorts of provisions, but fishmongers quickly took over as the literal and figurative intensity of the trade overwhelmed the market’s butcher shops and other stores. From roughly 1850 to 1950, Fulton Market would dominate wholesale fish provisioning in the United States and much of the country’s fish would pass through Fulton. Though its significance to the broader industry waned going into the mid twentieth century and beyond, the market remains vital to New York City and remains the second biggest fish market in the world after Tsukiji Market in Tokyo.

Rees analyzes Fulton Market through the lens of provisioning chains — the connections between people who want to eat fish and the people who live off their capture and distribution. Initially short and simple — fisherman who sailed the waters around New York City brought their catch to Fulton at the end of the day — the provisioning chains eventually became long and complicated as the city’s surrounding waters were depleted. Over time, Fulton’s wholesalers had to develop relationships with ever-more distant boats and introduce ever-more exotic types of fish to the market. Fulton dealers introduced European fish to the market only after the mackerel, halibut, and lobster populations around New England crashed. This dynamic required both lengthening supply chains and managing their increasing complexity — for instance, learning to source oysters accurately was vital as customers became increasingly concerned about polluted oyster beds.

As the market supplied itself from more distant locales, Fulton’s ecological impact widened. Intensification of the fishing industry led to geographic extensification and technological and institutional innovation. That is to say, as more and more fish were pulled out of waters around New York, wholesalers had to look further and further away and develop more and more complex means of preserving and moving fish. As Rees suggests, and I have also explored in my work on meat, the length and complexity of this process served to obscure the ecological impact of food — consumer appetites were, after all, destroying ecosystems a world away.

Though for a time Fulton Market was the heart of fish distribution for much of the United States, its focus shifted over time as technology revolutionized the industry. Because Fulton had an established and influential market that predated modern cooling technologies, it was slow to embrace refrigeration. As a result, other locations would gain prominence during the twentieth century, driving the industry’s decentralization. The rise of rapid freezing methods that facilitated simple processing like the production of frozen fish fillets or later fish sticks accelerated the process: “fresh fish could be a lucrative business for wholesalers, but only frozen fish could feed the masses. However, without enough proper freezing and cold storage facilities, it was difficult to produce around the Fulton Fish Market. As a result, new provisioning chains developed that bypassed the market entirely,” (111).

An irony of this story of technological change was that as Fulton took in fish from more distant waters, its importance to the national supply chain waned. Though Fulton’s business boomed, it was increasingly only for supplying the city. According to Rees, Fulton market handled forty-four varieties of fish in 1880 when it was the nation’s preeminent fish market but a staggering 450 varieties in 1987 when its reach was pretty much only New York City.

The rise of processing and preservation technologies would also drive the bifurcation of the fish market. Pre-processed and retail-ready fish fillets turned fish flesh into an increasingly abstract commodity for the low end of the market, while the industrialization of trawling fleets (and their increasing speed) allowed the provision of a variety of fish to restaurants that redefined the high end of the market. Fulton market, however, could only supply one end. Rees explains, “during the early days of the original market, the seafood wholesalers created entire provisioning chains with themselves at the center. Now, the wholesalers mostly sell expensive fish from very far away to high-end restaurants and retailers” (217). Wholesalers elsewhere would dominate the low-cost, high-volume frozen fish business. This is reflective of industrial food in general. At the high-end, artisanal approaches and short supply chains have found a renaissance, but it is a luxury market. Large processors and low prices dominate the rest.

Many colorful characters worked in Fulton Market — Al Smith was only the most famous. I did want to hear more about these people and the work that kept the market running. The importance of a fuller labor history is evident from the fascinating chapters on organized crime. Fulton Market was one of the mafia’s more lucrative operations for much of the twentieth century. It only took controlling one crucial piece of the labor process. The mafia controlled the men who unloaded the fish into the market, and if you did not pay them off, they would let your fish rot in the street. Without this one crucial piece of the labor process, the functioning of the entire market cannot be explained. Stories like this abound, and a focused discussion of Fulton’s labor history would have done much to enrich the provisioning-chain story in Rees’ book.

Beyond physical labor, there is also a fascinating history of human knowledge and expertise.  A provisioning chain depends on technologies and business practices, but it also depends on human relationships and knowledge. The expertise of buyers, knowing information like the location of quality oyster beds, or which ships were due to arrive in the coming weeks, explained success and failure at Fulton. Perhaps this question of expertise and the human relationships that sustained Fulton could be the focus of future research.

Jonathan Rees’ book is a fascinating deep dive into the history of a place that fundamentally shaped both New York and the global fishery. All histories are at once local, regional, and global, but this is truer in some places than others. By virtue of being in one of the country’s (and world’s) biggest cities, Fulton has had an outsized influence on that city and the world far beyond. In a time in which markets are global in scale and ever-more abstract, Fulton’s history is a reminder that large abstract markets start as small physical ones, and it is in understanding the day-to-day buying and selling that we can appreciate both the creativity of modern economic life as well as its grave ecological consequences.

Joshua Specht is Assistant Professor of History at University of Notre Dame. He is author of Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (2019).