There were dozens of guys with pushcarts on the streets in the late 1930s: the hot dog vendor; the Eskimo Pie Man trying to compete against the Good Humor Man’s bells, the white uniform, the Sam Browne belt, and the freezer truck full of ice cream bars topped with shredded coconut and toasted almonds. There was a short old man in a shin-length coat with a brazier full of charcoal on his cart, selling chestnuts at the top of the steps at the downtown entrance of the 86th Street subway station, and there were half a dozen. different street vendors of fruits and vegetables. The peddler who parked his cart in front of the Presbyterian Church at 79th and Broadway sold the sweetest, juiciest cherries I’ve ever tasted, deep red in color and about the size of the little plums they call pruni. My father’s office was at 79th and West End and when the cherries were in season he would buy a five pound bag on the way home for forty-nine cents I think. He once bought a twenty-five pound box and after we gobbled it up, we dried the holes in the window sill and my mother made us poufs out of the patches he used to sew quilts on.
In those days the cherries came from the nearby orchards. You got them the day after they were picked so they would always be ripe, but the season only lasted a couple of weeks. Now they get them from California and Washington or from South America and I hear they put them through some process to keep them fresh. My children tell me that they even dye them red. All of that makes the season longer, but the cherries cost fifty times as much and they don’t taste like they used to.
The most formidable of the fruit peddlers was a sharp-tongued little man we called “Pop.” He was at the corner of 87th and West End selling fruits and vegetables for a cent or two a pound less than the Eighty-seventh Street Market, which was half a block between Broadway and West End. Pa was about five feet tall, with a stooped back, and drove a large, flat handcart with metal-rimmed wooden wheels and a metal slot in the front end for a wooden leg that he nailed in to balance the cart when placed on it. parked He had a metal spring scale with a clock face, a basket that hung from the scale to weigh fruit, and a supply of brown bags for what he sold and to mark the prices he charged. He marked the prices on the brown bags with a large black crayon and glued the bags to the ribbon end of an empty box. He then inserted the ribbon into the container of the particular fruit to which the price referred.
Every morning, he would stop his cart in front of the Eighty-seventh Street Market to see how much the Market was charging for peaches, pears, and green grapes, and then, right before their eyes, he would take his big black crayon and mark the prices on his brown paper bags that were a cent or two lower. The Market sold not only fruits and vegetables, but also meat, fish, preserves and dairy products, all under the same roof. That was unusual in those days. Most of the shops specialize in butchers, cheese shops, greengrocers and greengrocers and grocery stores. Each sold their own line of individual products. The owners of the Eighty-seventh Street Market considered Pop a mischievous dwarf with a pushcart. They felt that they were in a much higher category of company and that as taxpayers they should be protected from renegade characters like Pop.
The guys in the produce section had a special hatred for Pop. Every time he would park his cart in front of his stall to rip off his prices, they would run outside and yell at him to get out and throw their aprons over the price signs to try and prevent him from seeing what they were charging. Pop would laugh at them, tell them that America was a free country, he would mark the low prices right in their faces and tape them to their wooden slats for all to see. A few years later, one of the chains opened a supermarket in Amsterdam in the 1990s, the first one I can remember in our neighborhood. They gave the owners of the Eighty-seventh Street Market even more trouble than Pop.
Sometimes Dad would park his van at 91st and Broadway, where there used to be a subway stop, but around noon he always went down to 87th and West End, where there was a guy with a hot dog cart. Dad would trade the hot dog man pieces of fruit for hot dogs and they would both eat what our school told us was a balanced lunch from different food groups.
He always carried a huge wad of bills in the side pocket of his fake-check stained raincoat, and when a customer paid with a bill, he would take out the entire wad and, holding it lovingly in one grimy hand, give change, adding the bill the customer He handed over his roll and stuffed the roll into the pocket of his raincoat. We all secretly thought he was a millionaire, but millionaire or not, he was a tough and relentless competitor.
Every time someone walked past his wheelbarrow with bags of fruit from the Eighty-seventh Street Market, he would yell at them and tell them that his fruit was cheaper. He would then demand to know why they were walking past him with heavy bags when they could have bought his fruit, which was fresher, better and cheaper, and not have to carry their fruit so far to get it home. People cowered and ran, but Pop yelled at them in his shrill, piercing voice until they disappeared into their houses. Some would walk to 86th or 88th and go two blocks out of their way just to avoid the one-man challenge Pop would make them run.
He had compartments in his car for different sized paper bags, a tarp for when it rained, and I think I remember a white peddler license plate on the back of the car with his number. The last time I remember seeing him was the day Blue Book kicked the dead pigeon which struck the windshield of the Rockland and Orange County bus causing the driver to swerve sharply and side-swipe Pop’s wheelbarrow. they were scattered along the west side of West End Avenue from 88th Street up the slope to 87th.
Maybe the Orange and Rockland County Bus Company never paid Dad for his wheelbarrow. Or maybe he wasn’t a millionaire after all and he couldn’t afford to buy another one. Or maybe the Orange and Rockland bus company paid him so much in damages that he was able to retire, move to Florida, yell at the people there, and live happily ever after. But I don’t remember ever seeing Pop after that day.