He lifts his lantern, and we peek into the interior of one of these cool milk-cars. This has the bottled milk in cases. The cases are packed four tiers high—never higher—and your guide explains to you that four cases is the limit of a hand-truck. All these things make for simplicity in handling. You peer into another car. The ten-gallon cans are in long diagonal rows, covering the entire floor of the car. They form a regular tessellated pattern, like the marble tiling of old-fashioned hotels and banks.
“Those little farmer boys,” says the platform boss, “sure do that trick well. That speaks pretty neat for Sullivanville. They all used to put the cans in straight rows, running lengthwise of the car. One day one of the smartest of those Sullivanville boys discovered that by putting the cans in diagonal rows, this-wise, he would gain a hundred cans in the loading. That added a thousand gallons to the capacity of the car. The Super gave him a good job, and some day you’ll see he’ll be running a railroad of his own.”
Midnight.
Downtown is still more deserted, if that is possible, than when we first saw it three hours ago. The stillness of the deep night is hard upon the city; yet here on this broad quay street which runs its stone-paved length up and down past the wharves of the harbor-front, all is alive.
This is the midnight market. Under the very noses of the steamships that have brought this garden-truck up from the south, it is being auctioned off to a hundred or so keen-nosed, keener-witted wholesalers. They wander about under long awning roofs erected in the centre of the street, through the gaunt open shadowy spaces of the piers, poking into the tops of barrels, pinching, tasting, critically examining all the while that they are dickering in prices. When the day is fully born and downtown alive once again, there will be other wholesale markets, more sedate-looking affairs in rooms that have been built for the purpose by the traffic departments of the railroads. In these rooms, with the seats arranged in tiers and each seat having a broad writing arm like a college classroom, fruit and vegetables will be sold in carload lots. There will be records of prices—quotations. The thing will approach the dignity of those bourses where cotton and coffee and metals and securities are sold.
But the midnight market scorns such formalities, such dignities. It clings to its own hubbub—its own unsystematic way of accomplishing a great business. It prefers to sell as the stuff is unloaded; that has been its method for three-quarters of a century and any method that has stood 75 years is at least entitled to a measure of consideration. But not all its offerings have come by these big coasting steamships, whose outlines show vague at their piers in the darkness of the night. For, grinding against the piles of these same wharves, as the unseen tide changes, are groups of car-floats that have been ferried from the great railroad terminals across the river. Each car-float has two trackfuls of refrigerator cars—12 or 14 or 16 in all—lined against a long roofed platform running just above keel. When the pert and busy little tugs have pushed and pulled and bunted the floats all into position, the platforms are quickly connected by gangways, canvas-covered against the stress of hard weather. A great freight-house, almost Venetian in type, floats upon the surface of the silent river and becomes part and parcel of the pier itself. After that it is quick work to open each of the cars—to wheel out sample barrels of potatoes, of cabbage, of celery, of lettuce, of cauliflower—all the growing things of country farms that go to feed the hungry city.
The trading here is over in an hour, or two hours at the longest when the shipments are heavy; and then the wholesalers are wheeling their wagons into place to cart away their purchases to their own stores and warehouses. From these the retailers—the men who carry on their businesses in stalls in the public market-houses and those that have their own little shops on the street corners—make their selections. If you are a city man, you may now know that your grocer at the corner is up betimes, when the sun is just showing himself on lazy September mornings. He has been poking his way with his own horse and wagon down to the wholesalers, buying his day’s stock and getting it placed just before the earliest of the housewives begins her marketing.
You demand a concrete example of a city freight-house; and here it is—the historic St. John’s Park of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad in New York. Up over the lines of the Central, back for hundreds of weary miles, you may hear the railroaders speak of “the Park,” you may see long strings of cars, bearing merchandise tagged through to it. At Sixtieth Street, where the big freights of the New York Central come to a final halt, you see the cars sent south in long strings, each hauled by a red dummy locomotive and preceded by a boy astride a horse and holding a red flag, a familiar sight to all New Yorkers who reside upon the far west side of the town.
St. John’s Park handles a very large percentage of all the perishable food that comes into New York each day. It is the dingy freight-house that fills the double block between Hudson and Varick and Beach and Laight Streets; and when you ask, “Where is the park?” they will tell you that there was a day when the entire site of this freight-house—possibly the most congested in the world—was a gentle tree-filled square that faced old St. John’s Church. There is never a trace of the park nowadays. The old church now faces a narrow street wherein truckmen shove and elbow and disappear in the gates of the freight station.