Pushcart war fought before
Mayor de Blasio was right to pull the plug on a hastily concocted City Council bill to regulate street vendors. The issue has far more complexity and history than most New Yorkers realize, and deserves an in-depth civic discussion to fix problems that have been around, literally, for centuries.
The battle between established merchants and street peddlers dates as far back as 1691, when colonial authorities banned street selling in the city until two hours after public markets opened. Street vending was banned altogether in 1707, according to historian Daniel Bluestone, whose scholarly article “The Pushcart Evil” should be required reading for City Council members who take up this issue.
The vendors re-appeared in a compromise, the Thirty Minute Law, that required them to stay in a particular place for no more than a half hour at a time, giving rise to the famous wheeled pushcarts. But in 1886, four street vendors decided to stay put and set up an open-air market for lowcost food and goods on Hester St. — a trend that soon spread to Rivington, Orchard and other streets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Inevitably, store owners demanded — and got — a crackdown by City Hall after complaining that street sellers were undercutting their trade and clogging the streets. In 1906, a group called the East Side Push Cart Peddlers’ Association appealed for mercy to Mayor George McClellan.
“The members of our Association are a poor and miserable lot, and if you will not grant us our little privileges in order to make a living for ourselves and our families, you will drive us to desperation,” the organization wrote.
“Please give this your immediate attention, as otherwise we will be compelled to march ourselves, our wives and little children down to the City Hall, and we will wave black banners to show to this metropolis how its poor are treated by the Mayor of the City.”
That was 1906. Change the names and you could have the same pleas and protests today.
“We don’t make that much money. The permit holder makes more money than us,” complained Walid Abdelwahab last week. Abdelwahab runs a halal food cart on the Upper West Side, and pays $24,000 every two years to rent the food-selling permit of a lucky owner. The number of permits issued by the city has been frozen for decades, creating a lucrative black market.
To make matters worse, there’s no single agency that regulates street vendors. General goods are overseen by the Department of Consumer Affairs, but the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene licenses food carts. If the food is heated, the Fire Department might step in, and Sanitation can issue fines for trash.
The Parks Department handles permits and rules for concessions on parkland, while vendors who sell written or artistic work are protected by the First Amendment and largely free of regulation. A separate cluster of rules govern permits for military veterans.
The system, in short, is a complicated mess.
Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, to her credit, tried to bring order from the current chaos with a bill that would have established a central agency to regulate all vendors and allowed for a gradual increase in permits over the next decade.
But the Council bill left too many issues unresolved, such as how, when and whether geographic permits would be issued.
“I’m very aware of bricks-and-mortar stores, store owners who are pillars of the community, mom and pop stores who are struggling right now,” Mayor de Blasio told me.
“I don’t want to see the vending community, as valuable as it is, create an undue amount of competition for those bricksand-mortar stores. Those issues that I raised over and over again were not treated sufficiently in the bill.”
De Blasio hasn’t ruled out revisiting the issue. “Rather than rush a piece of legislation that’s flawed, let’s get a good one. That could take a matter of weeks or months. It doesn’t have to take forever,” he said.
It definitely doesn’t have to take forever, but we also don’t have to start from scratch. Over the last century, at least a dozen city commissions and/or City Council committees have conducted one “new” study after another of the vendor issue.
The next Council should consult the Municipal Archives, review these studies and hold a meaningful public discussion about how to balance New York’s need for lowcost goods with the rights and duties of the merchants trying to sell them to us.