Her Cart's Wheels Slow to a Halt
By: Jason Begay
New York Times, June 29, 2002
This is Annie's life.
Awake and on the waterfront, long before the ripples
of the East River even begin to reflect any sign of the sun. She is
hunched over a red, wire-frame shopping cart yelling at the fish market
workers who trickle around her to buy newspapers, socks, underwear,
bandannas and — Annie's biggest seller, much to her regret —
cigarettes.
"Don't smoke," she yells out, as she throws
a book of matches on a box.
Every morning for half a century, Annie has walked in
the morning dark, selling to the fish-lugging men at the Fulton Fish
Market. The market is the largest of its kind nationwide, with 59
wholesalers selling hundreds of thousands of pounds of seafood every week.
But Annie's life, as she has known it for so long,
will be changing in the next two years. The market is set to relocate to
Hunt's Point in the Bronx, into a large indoor refrigerated facility. As
it stands now, much of the market consists of rows of iced boxes stacked
neatly across the parking lots along both sides of South Street, violating
federal regulations about selling seafood outdoors.
"Look at this," said Robert Smith, vice
president for Arrow Seafood, with slight revulsion. "Do you sell food
anywhere in the northern hemisphere out on the street?"
Construction has already begun on a new, $85 million,
400,000-square-foot indoor facility at Hunt's Point. Janel Patterson, a
spokeswoman for the city's Economic Development Corporation, said the new
building should be complete in late 2004 and that all 59 wholesalers have
already staked a lease plan. The fish market, which will then be known as
the Fulton Fish Market at Hunt's Point, will be bright and hygienic.
But Annie may not be there. She says she may be too
old to travel every day to the Bronx from her apartment in the East
Village. How old is too old? Sorry, she won't give her age, though she
hints that she might be in her late 70's. Annie, also called Shopping Bag
Annie, or South Street Annie, is reticent about other details: no last
names, no current pictures (not her face, anyway).
"That's not important," she said, blunt and
solid. "Let them guess."
But it's obvious that she has been at the Fulton Fish
Market longer than most of its current employees. Ask anyone, and they
will say that Annie was there when they started: Joe (Tuna) Centrone, 23
years ago; Bobby (Tuna) DiGregorio, from the early 80's; Steve (Coffee),
who preferred not to give his last name, despite his "better than 20
years" there; and Frank Fogliano of Fair Fish Company, who remembers
seeing her at the market in 1957.
The fish workers, almost entirely men, are loud,
often spewing obscenities. Annie can be just as loud and just as vulgar.
"Have you ever seen anyone like me?" she
asked one morning recently. "Even I'm old, they still respond to me.
They respond to a hug, or a kiss, or a joke. So I make jokes."
In its nighttime version, the four blocks of bricks
and asphalt on South Street are crowded with vans, forklifts and
merchants. It's hard to imagine the thick, metallic smell of fish that
saturates the wet street. It is especially hard to imagine during the
hours when the street, which intersects the South Street Seaport, is a
tourist haven for bright restaurants, bars and clothing stores.
"Look at this place," Annie said one
morning, as fishmongers, some with knives, others with hooks over their
shoulders, crowded the four blocks pushing handcarts. "It's so full
of life."
There was a young journeyman digging through her cart
who looked at Annie. He wouldn't give his name, but he is one of the few
of the fishmongers willing to admit that this predawn society is bound for
the Bronx. Most are like Mr. Smith and Joe Tuna, who doubt that the move
will happen in their lifetimes.
"It's not going to be the same at Hunt's
Point," the journeyman said.
Annie, appalled at the notion, replied, "Get out
of here with that."
If she is in a reflective mood, Annie will consider
the notion of a displaced fish market. "I'm getting old," she
said. "To tell the truth, I might not be around." She paused.
"In the best case scenario, I would go with them."
Age and fatigue are burdens for her. But when Annie
laughs, or cracks a lewd joke or screams an angry reminder of the money
owed her, she is without age. "You become what you act like,"
she said. "If you're vibrant, you become youthful. There's no age as
far as the boys are concerned."
Annie has a simple schedule, beginning about 4 a.m.
when her bus drops her near the market. She will sit at Arrow Seafood to
talk with Joe Tuna and Steve Coffee, who sells coffee and pastries. Around
5:30 a.m., Annie starts her first round down both sides of the market's
two-block stretch.
Her greeting is quick and high-pitched: "Woohoo!"
She tries to acknowledge everyone, if not by name
then by national origin. "All nationalities work here," she
said, pointing out a Portuguese immigrant pushing a handcart; he had just
received his citizenship document. "It's wonderful," she said.
Annie buys a stack of about 50 copies of the The
Daily News and The New York Post about 6:30 a.m. and sells them for $1
each. She leaves the market around 8 a.m. By this time she is usually
exhausted.
Annie makes enough in sales to regularly send money
to both her daughters in California. She has no pension beyond Social
Security. All she has, she said, is "a good feeling I'm going to
survive."
She actually has more than that.
In 1999, Joe Tuna and Steve Coffee collected a
retirement fund for Annie, raising more than $3,000, an amount that Annie
recalled with wide eyes and a loud can-you-believe-that tone. She moved to
Los Angeles.
But retirement didn't take. "You don't know how
it is to lay there when you're retired, like an old dog," she said.
"Here, I'm young. They all like me." Nine months after she left,
Annie was on a plane back to New York on a ticket she says was bought by
her fish market friends.
After Sept. 11, the market moved out of the red zone
to Hunt's Point. Two weeks passed. Annie's customers, her friends, were
still on the wrong side of the East River. "I waited and waited, they
never came back," she said. "So I went to them." She took a
cab to Hunt's Point, paying $20 a day. They said: "Annie's here. Now
the Fish Market is complete."
There is a picture hanging in a plastic frame in the
office of Fair Fish Company that Annie says was taken sometime in the
1940's during a three-month bicycle tip from New York to Fairbanks,
Alaska. It is a color photocopy, enlarged from a faded, discolored
wallet-size image. The young woman is running barefoot on the dirt road
that would become the Alcan Highway from British Columbia into Alaska.
"People look at that picture and can't believe
it's her," said Frank Fogliano, who sits in that office. "She's
an angel."
Joe Tuna, a thick, menacingly quiet salesman, has no
qualms calling Annie an "an angel in rags."
"Do you believe in angels?" he asked.
"Do you think an angel is going to be dressed in a three-piece Armani
suit?"
Joe Tuna chewed on his cigar and sharpened his pencil
with a knife. "You never know," he added. "You just never
know."
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