Catharine Market and Its Neighborhood

This chapter examines the neighborhood setting, which provided the immediate economic, social, and cultural contexts of the public markets. Through a case study of Catharine Market, it documents the piecemeal process by which the neighborhood marketplace was assembled, along with the consolidation of its economic agglomeration, internal social and spatial order, everyday functioning, formal and informal management, and daily relations to customers. By the early nineteenth century, Catharine Market served as one of Gotham's largest and most thriving food emporia. It functioned as the regular meeting point for diverse participants in the provisions trade: neighborhood food vendors, including butchers, hucksters, and peddlers; Long Island and other New York region farmers; fishermen harvesting the city's plentiful coastal and inland waterways; and, of course, the area's booming and diverse population of merchants, artisans, and laborers shopping daily at this marketplace.