The New York Times ran an obituary yesterday about Joseph Ades, “the white-haired man with the British accent, the expensive European suits and shirts,” who had been a fixture among the vendors at the Greenmarket in Manhattan’s Union Square. I was drawn to the article not because of a remembered encounter with Ades but because of my interest in the legal obstacles facing street vendors, often immigrants and people of color, in New York City. In the Times’ obit, David Hughes, the operations manager at the Greenmarket, noted that Mr. Ades conducted his business on the fringes of the market “because he never obtained a permit to do business there, and if he staked out a spot too close to the vendors, someone would complain and security guards would be alerted.” Although Ades managed to persist through this wink-wink arrangement, most street vendors are not so fortunate.
New York’s Urban Justice Center, a non-profit organization that serves “New York City’s most vulnerable residents through a combination of direct legal service, systemic advocacy, community education and political organizing,” several years ago established the “Street Vendor Project” to assist vendors who have been victims of New York’s aggressive “quality of life” crackdown (vendors have been denied access to licenses, restricted from streets closed to them at the urging of powerful business groups, or penalized with onerous fines for minor violations).
The most successful of the project’s public fundraisers is the “Vendy Awards,” a juried competition between five or six of New York’s best “street chefs,” with the winners determined by the attending public (who pay for the pleasure of sampling the various fare – all proceeds going to support the project’s work) and a panel of food “experts.” This past fall, the judges at the fourth annual event, held at the Tobacco Warehouse in DUMBO, included well-known food writer and journalist Calvin Trillin.
As to Mr. Ades (R.I.P.), his story, as told in the obituary, is a romantic one, to be sure, but better to ask almost any New York City vendor for his or her story if you want the real word on the street.
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