Vintage shots from days gone by!

2,944 pages. This is gonna take a while.

 

Center Tex Smith in red shirt, Tom McMullin on left, Near Hwy. 99 Fresno CA.

 

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showpost.php?p=5960821&postcount=28

 

Thanx ehdubya, much appreciated.
.

 

That is one, damn big tree!

 

Yeah, but notice how it's not running? Shoulda built a Ford!!

Doc.

(PS: That is one neat looking car, I love the cowled Fuelers!!)

 

Grumman XF4F-2

 

Went through ALL of it??
Like from the start?
Hell man, it's been hard just keeping up with the latest page let alone catching up from the start!! That my friend is dedication!!

Doc.

 

Info. on this one anybody?

 

Tuesday Weld and Mamie Van Doren

 

Buddy Holly

 

Mamie needs to level off her front suspension...

 

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1935 Harris

 

Its an Arizona based top gas dragster. Cant recall the owner(s) name right off. And yes, I liked the tail section art of the early to mid sixties too. No real purpose served other than an excercise in metal shaping and paint.

 

For post # 58861 1952 NYC Washington Street Produce Market night photo taken by Walter Albertin for World Telegram and Sun Manhattan's Famed Washington Market
Mimi Sheraton's father was a commission produce grocer who contracted for crops from farmers around the country to be sold in Washington Market. This was an unusual occupation in her neighborhood, one that required explanation to her childhood friends whose fathers worked in the garment district or in a profession.

Washington Market was known as “The Street” to those who worked there. It was on the Lower West Side of Manhattan and a vital part of New York City in 1946 when New York was still the busiest port city in the world. According to a New York Times Sunday Magazine story in November 1945, even though every major city had a wholesale market, about one-eighth of all the produce in the nation passed through New York City, most of it through Washington Market, which spread for blocks north from Fulton Street through what is now Tribeca to Chambers Street along West, Washington and Greenwich Streets and the narrow cross streets between them. It was the largest fruit and produce exchange in the nation. Sheraton writes that most of the business owners were Jewish or Italian but the workers were an ethnic melange.

Besides the piers, warehouses, food processing plants and office buildings, Washington Market occupied scores of Federalist and Greek Revival-style townhouses that had been built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when this area briefly had been a fashionable uptown neighborhood inhabited by the city's merchant and professional classes. According to The Port of New York Authority by Erwin Wilkie Bard, in 1942 about 40 percent of the produce was coming to the market by trucks, the rest arriving by barges and freighters. The major railway freight lines had piers along the Hudson to ferry trainloads of goods across the river from New Jersey. To the south were the “banana docks” where the “great white fleet” of the United Fruit Company disgorged bananas, pineapples and other goodies from the company's fiefdoms in Latin America.

A retail market built in 1914 to replace an earlier structure occupied the entire block between Washington, West, Fulton and Vesey Street, across from the New York Telephone Company building. The interior of the retail market was divided into stalls that were leased to food merchants of every kind. In 1939, according to The WPA Guide to New York City, you could find “caviar from Siberia, Gorgonzola cheese from Italy, hams from Flanders, sardines from Norway, English partridge, native quail, squabs, wild ducks and pheasants; also fresh swordfish, frogs legs, brook trout, pompanos, red snappers, codfish tongues and cheeks, bluefish cheeks, and venison and bear steaks.” The war had put a crimp in these indulgences but transportation was slowly returning to normal in 1946 and limited importation of luxury foods from abroad had begun.

Until the mid-40s a separate farmers market operated to the north of Washington Market on Grosvenor Street from 4 to 10 AM where restaurateurs and consumers could buy produce straight from local farmers. By the end of the decade this would be closed to allow the city to create the meatpacking district. The nearby West Washington Street Market, which sold live poultry to kosher butchers, also shut down at this time.

Jersey commuters who rode the ferries that departed from piers in the neighborhood stopped by the Washington Market retail market as did some Manhattan residents and tourists, but the wholesale market was at its busiest from midnight to dawn when its streets were a bedlam of trucks and farmers, teamsters, distributors, jobbers and wholesalers. Wooden shed roofs jutting from the second floor of brick stalls covered the sidewalks. Hand trucks and horse carts hauling bushel baskets and crates jostled each other as workers pushed their way through the flotilla of trucks. Curses and horn blasts filled the air. Light bulbs hanging from the shed roofs and truck headlights cast intermittent circles of light on the dark streets. On cold nights workers warmed themselves over bonfires of wood from discarded crates and baskets burning inside metal drums. The delivery trucks, including long trailers banned from all other city streets, were supposed to clear out by 2 AM when the buyers' trucks were allowed into the market, but traffic jams assured that this was the time of greatest confusion.

The market had a reputation as a rough and tumble place. This was where, a hundred years earlier, the gangs of Irish immigrants and native born Americans depicted in the movie "Gangs of New York" fought each other for dominance on the waterfront. The Teamsters Union ruled the streets in 1946. It was reasonably safe but still raw enough to provide a thrill for tourists looking for something off the beaten track. In an ad that ran that May 1946 in the New York Times for Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, a nightclub in the Hotel Paramount, Rose, or a copywriter in his name, recommended that nighthawks take an excursion to the market between 2 AM and 6 AM on their way home from their favorite gin mills to “see one of Pop Knickerbocker's most colorful productions” where “there's never a cover charge.” He described a scene where vendors tossed ripe plumbs at customers and at dawn nuns picked through the discards to feed the poor.

Photos of Washington market in 1939 can be found here.