A painted angler in a plaid shirt and canvas hat, seen from behind, casting from a river under hazy blue hills.

“The level of salesmanship that is required to sell someone a dried seahorse is truly admirable.”

Dispatches from the Desk

Get
Cutty

The best parts of New York are its cutty, rough edges: scrap collectors, seahorse hawkers, and four-dollar dumplings.

By Fitz

Chinatown is a special place. I think people are right to say that it’s one of the last neighborhoods that feels like the “Real New York.”

One time I was coming home from the bar on trash day and walked past an elderly Chinese man collecting scrap metal. He was crouched down over a window air conditioner unit with a wrench, and as he twisted one of the parts free, a burst of refrigerant sprayed up in his face. He proceed to let out the funniest shriek I’ve heard in a long time and paced away holding his hands over his eyes, temporarily blinded. After about 10 seconds he regained his composure and got back to the task at hand, getting whatever valuable metals lie inside of the shell of the unit. Real sigma shit. Nothing was going to stop this dude from getting another few dollars of scrap. Not even chemical burns and/or facial frostbite.

I see similar levels of dedication from the elderly ladies that collect cans and bottles from the public trashcans, the vendors that post up next to the Manhattan bridge selling blue crabs set out on a painters tarp, or the ladies hawking dried seahorses as herbal medicine. The level of salesmanship that is required to sell someone a dried seahorse is truly admirable.

Continued on page 64

Get Cutty Continued from page 63

A man in a white coat and gray cap stands at a fish counter stacked with whole fish and handwritten price cards. — Photo by Piers Greenan.

“This is good for the man. Make you strong and energy.” she says, gesturing at the groin area. “You boil with soup. Girlfriend will be happy!”

That dialogue is quite convincing to a man on the street, and the health benefits are pretty intuitive. Of course if I ate a mummified seahorse out of this wooden crate on the sidewalk, it’ll help my “vitality.”

When I first moved here, I stayed in a temporary furnished apartment for a month at Eldridge and Division. It was a shared 3 Bedroom with two other people I hadn’t met before. The building was quite gritty, and when I first arrived, I pulled the bedframe away from the wall as I cleaned up. The bedroom window backed up directly to the Manhattan bridge train tracks, and the AC unit continually sucked in soot and debris, leading to an inch-thick layer of caked dust on the windowsill. It was disgusting and loud and I loved every bit of it.

I used to walk through the Chrystie Street park on the way to work, and at 8AM each day, there would be a pack of Chinese people following two tall East African gentlemen with roller coolers in tow. As soon as the men would find a suitable spot to stop, a bidding war would ensue over various cuts of meat. A calm summer morning in the park would erupt with hands in the air, cash in between fingers, gesturing loudly at the men to sell them the finest discount flank steak or rack of ribs. I’m not sure where in the supply chain these entrepreneurs sat, but I’d imagine based on the context clues that these cuts fell off the truck.

On a sidewalk, a man in a white apron carries a very large fish wrapped in plastic, hung from a metal pole on his shoulder. — Photo by Piers Greenan.

After work, I was a regular at King Dumpling, which was a staple dinner for me in my budget-conscious first year in the city. Four dollars for 10 pork and chive dumplings prepared in questionable conditions. I would watch the aunties wrapping the meat with dough behind the counter, occasionally picking a bit of bone or cartilage out of their mouth with their hands between dumpling construction. I know that these are made with love, and that cancels out any sanitary concerns I had. To this day I think it’s one of the best cheap meals in Lower Manhattan, aside from the fact that you’ll feel a lead bomb going off in your stomach about 15 minutes after your meal.

I ramble about all this because I’ve been walking through these areas a lot more leisurely lately, and pondering what I really enjoy about living here. There’s 100 tweets a day about how New York is the best city in the world, but very few seem to focus on the cutty, rough edges that make it the place it is. A good neighborhood is comprised of characters that have lived in that block for their entire lives, never departing further than is necessary to sustain, just as Jesus never traveled more than a few hundred miles from his birthplace. These people are one hundred times cooler than a transplant like myself simply by existing. They have never drank a glass of natural wine. They smoke Chunghwas because that’s their father’s favorite cigarette, not because they are trying to out-niche the next guy. Their horribly misspelled bootleg Balenciaga tee looks better than your real one. Without them, the city becomes one giant froyo pop-up line, complete with polaroid photobooth and afrohouse DJ. We don’t want that now, do we? If your primary objective upon moving to New York is assimilate into a carbon copy frat bro at The Spaniard, or a post-ironic piercing laden multi-hyphenate that walks around dimes, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Get off the beaten path and force yourself to experience what is left of the old New York. Get Cutty.

This dispatch first ran on Substack. Read it there · Back to Contents

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