Manhattan Transfer

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After midnight, this market comes to life.

THEY ARE HARDLY FISHING BOATS, let alone clipper ships, yet the aerodynamic rake of hoods and cabs, the festive rigging of running lights and the vertical twin exhaust stacks could make you think so, particularly in a slanting rain along the East River in lower Manhattan several hours before dawn. For a moment, it is easy to imagine that these sleek, newly arrived land schooners —Whites, Macks, Peterbilts and Kenworths—are berthed instead of parked, safely tucked into various slips around South Street after long sea voyages, waiting in the mist to be off-loaded by gangs of longshoremen.

But these are vehicles, not vessels, manned by drivers rather than sailors. Even so, the illusion that they are watercraft persists, heightened by the names of home ports painted on the cab doors: Providence, Portland, Ft. Lauderdale, Montauk, Charleston, Saginaw; all of them capitals of fish, saltwater or fresh, and all connected to the Fulton Street Fish Market (wholesale only) by narrow streams of road and winding rivers of interstate.

At midnight the trucks still wait, their diesels idling to keep refrigeration units running and cargo cold. Some of the drivers are stretched out on sleeping racks behind the seats, others are drinking coffee or walking about. Still others are talking to women, most of whom have emerged in small groups from nearby bars. Police and ambulance sirens wail in the distance. It is chilly, somewhere in the upper 30s, and here and there steel drums belch fire, their contents luridly ablaze. Homeless men stand around them rubbing their hands and staring into the flames. Underfoot, the cobblestones have grown slippery from the mixture of rain, motor oil and Goodrich tire. Along the street itself, white vapor rises from ironcovered manholes, venting the volcanic utilities below. The air above, meanwhile, has become increasingly suffused with the deep collective sweetness of raw, sea-spawned protein. In other words, with the ubiquitous, penetrating, impolite, trucked-in smell of fish.

By nine in the morning, the neighborhood will have been more or less sanitized. Swept up, hosed down and almost miraculously scent-free, it will offend no one in the ordinary world, which down here includes the financial district as well as a pavilioned pleasure palace on Pier 17 called the South Street Seaport, a combination shopping mall and maritime museum, with the dominance falling to the former. At this hour, office workers hurry past to nearby jobs in the insurance canyons, power-suited Wall Streeters slide out of limousines or stash their BMWs on the parking piers, and tourists begin to port in from buses and subways for a packaged taste-faint and contrived-of the old New York sea trade. In addition to ship models, carvings, books, posters, T-shirts and a wealth of other nautical gimcracks, the taste is preserved as well in floating memorabilia: among others, Ambrose, a decommissioned lightship whose beacon once guided shipping into New York harbor, and the 475- foot steel-hulled bark Peking, formerly a giant in the Cape Horn nitrate trade. It is like a zoo of extinct but embalmed beasts. Next door, however, the fish market-in its own way a bit of a relic-is shut down tight.

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