A Perishable Business

Five decades after Lower Manhattan’s produce market was relocated to the Bronx to make room for the new World Trade Center, the fate of Hunts Point’s family-owned operations is once again uncertain.

Photos by Emon Hassan

“We’ve got a great view of Manhattan out here,” says Matthew D’Arrigo, first vice president of the Hunts Point Produce Market, the southeast Bronx site that is part of the world’s largest wholesale food distribution center. One bright Tuesday morning twelve years ago, as D’Arrigo climbed onto the market’s roof to take in the vista, the New York City skyline was transformed by heavy swells of smoke that streamed out from the Twin Towers against an otherwise cerulean sky.

Then, they fell.

Before construction of the World Trade Center began in 1966, space had to be cleared, and people and commerce moved. Among them were specialty purveyors of meat, fish and produce, many of them family businesses that had fed New York City from Washington Market in Lower Manhattan for 155 years. But commercial quarters, particularly of the produce trade at Washington Market, had become outmoded and unsanitary and in need of a modern restart. So the city built a new home just for the wh…