Vendors

Continued from page 27 culture” and Black entrepreneurship. Nova Felder, who works in the council member’s office and is a lead organizer of the coalition, said he used to sell books with his father as a child. He helped create the task force focused on issues in street vending about a year ago. “I came to understand why Black people vend on the streets,” said Felder about his childhood. “One, because it’s lucrative, but two, a lot of times we’ve been pushed out of traditional business, especially in New York City where rents are too damn high. This was a way for people to survive.”

Lloyd Williams, president and CEO of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce and co-founder of Harlem Week, spoke to the Amsterdam News about the situation with street vendors in Harlem, as well as Adams’s recent decision. Williams said the transfer of enforcement from DCWP to DSNY “actually makes sense.”

“The fact that the street vendors are reacting—I understand that, but it’s a simple question of are we communicating that,” Williams said. “Consumer Affairs has a very small enforcement staff and Sanitation has a greater responsibility to maintain the street beds and the sidewalks in all of the areas, so, there’s a logic for moving it from one (DCWP) to the other (DSNY). But because they have not sought to communicate with each other and to explain why certain things happen, everything is seen in an adversarial relationship.”

Discussing ways to support street vendors in Harlem, Williams highlighted the need for improved communication between vendors, as well as with store owners and the city agencies across the board, along with having designated groups and spokespeople to address vendors’ concerns.

“There is the ability for all to survive and all to thrive if they are organized in where they are and how they place themselves,” he said. “There could, in fact, be the opportunity to have store owners and street vendors actually complement each other in promoting each other’s presence [by saying] that you can come and ‘get some books, when you visit my clothing store.’

“The question continually goes back to how we organize, so that there are persons who are designated to speak for the interests of the vendors. They may say, ‘Let’s organize so that there is a spokesperson speaking for all of the vendors of clothing, let’s get a spokesperson that is speaking for all the vendors of [other goods].”

As a co-founder of Harlem Week, which features multiple events for street vendors throughout each summer, Williams also noted a solution to help vendors is strategic placements so they are not immediately in competition with store owners or each other.

“For example, street vendors who are selling books are not in competition with stores immediately in front of them that are selling clothing,” Williams said. The question is “how do we arrive at that balance that needs to take place.”

Former Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields is another staple in the Harlem community and the second Black woman to hold that position. Fields said that street vending definitely needs regulation that can provide for the vendors themselves while maintaining public safety. She’s not necessarily in agreement that it should be handled by Sanitation.

Fields recalled that during her time as a city councilmember, from 1989 to 1993, street vending was “out of control,” which led directly to the controversial establishment of the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market on 116th Street in following years. The open air African market had its own designated lot, controlled by the nearby masjid (Muslim house of worship) and is now a popular tourist attraction in Harlem.

“We recognized that we needed more small stores for Black people and small business locations, and everyone could not be on 125th Street,” said Fields. “It was in direct response to wanting to create opportunities for those who wanted to do business.”

While the African market was successful, other similar projects have failed to get off the ground. Mart 125, according to Amsterdam News archives from 1991, had 52 Black vendors who often complained about the high costs of booth rent. The city evicted them in 1998, and the building has sat vacant and deteriorating since, reported Patch.

Fields added that a horrific fire at what was Freddie’s Fashion Mart in 1995 also led to a crackdown and regulation of vendors. The New York Times reported that a tenant dispute between a Black-owned church, a Jewish landowner, and an African-owned record store was at the heart of the fire and subsequent shootings and suicide at the mart. Reverend Al Sharpton and others had rallied with a boycott in front of the mart for weeks leading up to the tragedy because the owner of Freddie’s did not employ Black workers.

These kinds of boycotts against whiteowned businesses in Harlem that refused to hire Black people were common, reported the Amsterdam News at the time. There were reports going back to the 1930s that food and goods sold to Black residents in Harlem were purposefully “shoddy and overpriced,” and there was a prejudice against Black workers and street vendors, according to AmNews archives.

The racially charged incident in 1995 claimed eight lives. That was then, though, and times inevitably changed.

Felder said the laws over the last five decades are the culmination of a criminalization of Black street vending. He said that a “negative campaign fueled by brick-andmortar businesses” in 1979 inspired the cap on general street vending licenses in the city’s administrative code.

Another vendor advocate in the councilmember’s office, Robert Jackson, remembered that in the 1980s and ’90s, some people would set up along Harlem (and citywide) streets, selling contraband. He figured that is why there’s still a profoundly negative view of street vending.

“I remember them selling TVs, T-shirts, DVDs, hats, Black Power paraphernalia,” said Jackson. “I wouldn’t call it hustle culture. It’s entrepreneurship.”

Some activists and members of the community fought against the removal of vendors from the 125th Street stretch. They correctly suspected that a total facelift of the popular 125th section was afoot. The big chain stores began to pepper the area around the Apollo Theater: the Gap, Red Lobster, American Eagle, AMC, Children’s Place, Starbucks, etc.

The fear now is that Sanitation, as a “real strong enforcement agency,” will throw vendors’ goods in the trash, said Felder. That hasn’t necessarily happened on a large scale as feared in Harlem, but there have been instances where street vendors were overly ticketed or “harassed,” he said.

Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, deputy director of the Street Vendor Project (SVP), drilled down on the policy and enforcement aspect of street vending. She said the city agency that oversees enforcement of street vending was somewhat of a “hot potato” situation for years until 2021. Years of advocacy work on behalf of vendors, she said, convinced leadership to move vending oversight from primarily the NYPD to the DCWP. However, many times, the police were still involved, she said.

Under Sanitation, Kaufman-Gutierrez said that there was little notice or outreach done for street vendors. She said that vendors are treated as a “quality of life issue” that harkens back decades, and is a racial justice issue hiding behind veiled language.

“The manner in which the transition took place was very non-transparent,” said Kaufman-Gutierrez. “So unfortunately, it’s the continuation of policy that has harmed these small businesses for so long, which is saying ‘all we have for you is enforcement.’”

Kaufman-Gutierrez said that the vendor caps in the 1970s and ’80s coincided with the rise of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and public-private partnerships, which saw vendors as a “blight” or “an eyesore.” By the 1990s, police sweeps were instituted to “clean up the streets,” she said. At that time, Rudy Giuliani was mayor. The bulk of other vendor restrictions were created by the Street Vendor Review Panel (Panel) in 1995 under Giuliani’s guidance.

According to a city report from 2021, under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city Council okayed new vending regulations by creating the Office of Street Vendor Enforcement (OSVE) and the Street Vendor Advisory Board. Local Law 18 of 2021 was then supposed to make room for more “mobile food vendors” or pushcart owners—a separate type of classification from general vendors, to get licenses and permits. Among other suggestions to make street vending easier, the board recommended that the city repeal the panel since it “has not met or altered restricted streets in any way since the early 2000s.”

The SVP’s agenda follows many of the board’s progressive recommendations, such as eliminating caps on licenses, creating an office of street vendor education, ending criminal summonses for vendors, and opening up more streets for vendors.

Of course, street vendors tend to agree with the board about legislation reform and are against the Sanitation oversight.

Calvin “Watchman” Baker, 61, is a vendor who works with SVP and has been selling for decades. He usually sells watches, rings, chains, colognes, T-shirts, and hats. Baker said that at one time, Harlem vendors had an unofficial “license” deal with local precincts under the table to allow vendors as long as they followed rules and regulations. He didn’t want to identify which ones or specific cops involved. Baker is advocating for more education and workshops to teach vendors how to apply for loans and resources to grow their businesses.

“It’s a part of American culture, not just Black culture,” said Baker of street vending as he multitasked at his table to fix a man’s watch. “You go all the way back, you see vendors. This is how a lot of businesses got started—selling things door to door and in the streets.”

Baker said there has always been harassment and arrests of vendors, and confiscations of their goods. “First and foremost, they’re looking at our stuff as junk,” he said of law enforcement and some agencies.

Shanny Herera runs a mobile jerk chicken spot with her husband, Hannibal, and is a co-lead organizer at Evolved Harlem Merchants Coalition. They started up their business during the pandemic when both of them were out of work. They are thriving as entrepreneurs and recently wanted to give back to the community with a free food event in Harlem for Father’s Day this year. They do have a food handler’s license and temporary mobile vendor license, she said, but the police shut them down because of Adams’s new city codes banning sidewalk barbecues.

“It is a regulation about Black people and their culture,” said Herera. “They think that when Black people gather, there is always a violent outcome.”

Sanitation didn’t comment directly and instead unhelpfully referred the Amsterdam News to the DCWP. A spokesperson for the DCWP confirmed that the department no longer oversees vending enforcement.

“We continue to license general vendors and also conduct enforcement for consumer protection issues like price posting and price gouging, as we do with retail businesses across the city,” said the DCWP.

Any change to the cap on the number of vendors would have to go through the city Council or New York State Legislature, said the DCWP.

The 125th Street BID declined to comment.

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.