| Well, folks, the Dragon Market has been closed, part of an ongoing attack on street vending in New York City orchestrated by the present administration. There is a hearing on June 24th regarding a new plan to ban street vending from over 400 more city streets.. | UPDATE! (4/15/99) |
For more information on these bans, and on what you can do to help prevent them, look up the web site maintained by ARTIST, an organization of aritists fighting for the right to work and sell on the streets: http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html |
Once again, street vendors and street markets in New York are being given the shaft by city officials who appear to be irrationally ignorant of the role of such markets in the vibrant life of the Big Apple. Continuing a campaign that has lasted as long as the Giuliani administration, officials have been consistently reducing the number of permits and the areas in which street vendors can operate until vendors find themselves being harassed constantly. Told to move from one place to another, they are then kicked out again as soon as the officials feel like it, it seems.
The story of the Dragon Market contains many such ironies. Set up originally five years ago in an underused urban park (you can find the market on Grant Street between Chrystie and Forsyth), it was supposed to house vendors who were removed from another area. A management company was selected to run the market and pay rent to the park department. As recently as three months ago, city police removed vendors from a nearby area on Canal street, telling the licensed vendors there to go to the Dragon Market. But the city was already planning to shut the market down, claiming that the management company was not running the market properly and had failed to pay the rent.
Now the vendors, after investing their savings in the stalls and paying monthly rents (along with, some charge, substantial "key monies" to secure the lease), find themselves being evicted because of the irresponsible (and possibly illegal) behavior of the management company, Century 21.
The city, in the meantime, washes its hands of the whole affair and claims that it is none of their business. After closing down other alternative areas for vendors in the neighborhood on the excuse that vendors could move to the market, they now claim that the market was an experiment that went wrong, and that they are not in the market business.
But if they are not in the market business, why did they allow a market there in the first place as an alternative to having stalls on the street? And if the experiment went wrong, why not try to fix it by arranging alternative forms of management?
The city was ready to tear down the market on February 19th, 1999, but the vendors obtained an injunction preventing the eviction to give the vendors time to move their belongings until March 1st. The vendors, with several allies they have found in the comunity including CAAAV and ARTIST, are trying to keep the market open, however, even though a park official clearly told reporters that the order allows them to shut the market down, so this may create some tension in the next few days. For now, the vendors are planning to bring back their equipment so that they can start selling from the market again, and there is a danger that the police might take action to prevent that.
My own analysis of the market suggests that it was indeed very badly managed. The stalls are far too large and unattractive, occupying two sides of a plaza, making them look more like shanty housing than street stalls. Business was aparently very slow because there was no pedestrian flow through the market, which could have been easily remedied by keeping the market open, rather than boxing in the plaza with the stalls themselves. Furthermore, the location of the stalls and their fixed nature makes cleaning the area a problem, which probably generated complaints from neighbors. Many of the stalls were unoccupied, particularly those in the middle, apparently because of the lack of traffic flow through the market.
I wil be following this story closely, so stay tuned for updates.
John C. Cross Author, Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City, Stanford University Press, 1998.
Go to John Cross's INFORMAL CYBERSPACE
Go to OPENAIR MARKET NET