Essex Market

Essex Market began as a solution to what city officials once called the pushcart evil. By the nineteen thirties, thousands of immigrant peddlers filled the narrow streets of the Lower East Side, selling everything from produce to prayer books from their wooden carts. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia viewed this open-air commerce as a public nuisance that blocked emergency vehicles and created sanitary hazards. To clear the streets, the city utilized federal funds from the Works Progress Administration to build a formal, indoor home for these displaced vendors. When the market officially opened in January of nineteen forty, it forced hundreds of peddlers to abandon their outdoor livelihood for a regulated stall inside a new four-building complex.