Las Vegas Age

A NEW YORKER AT LARGE

NEW YORK - The pushcart market and the stock market started from scratch in New York's age of adolescence.

The street venders of shoe laces, vegetables and tinware had a corner of their own under the buttonwood tree in Wall street, where burghers bought and sold seventeenth century securities.

The Stock Exchange was long since moved indoors and now its little brother, the Curb Exchange has transferred its activities from the gutters of Broad street to a roofed arena of its own.

The pushcart men are still outdoors, but even they are to be moved inside soon - not of their own free will, but because the city insists on getting the pushcarts off the streets.

The Pushcart Regiments

It is a pretty fancy to stroll through Hester street and picture the pushcart market as a new world survival of the oriental bazaars, but the pushcart markets of New York are peculiar to this city and quite unlike those in Europe or the far east.

They date back to 1866, when four roving peddlers first planted their carts permanently in an east side street.

Today there are about 4,500 pushcart vendors in New York, but they may place their carts only in one of the 53 public market streets designated by the city. Year by year the number of pushcarts declines - only four years ago there were 7,000 or more.

Three-fourths of the vendors sell fruit or vegetables. The rest sell merchandise. Every vendor must have a city license and pay a yearly fee. The vendors have their own association and their own weekly trade paper. Many of them work for one boss or padrone - a single man has been known to own 170 pushcarts.

The effort to get the pushcart men off the streets is not a new one, but it seems destined this time to succeed because of the pressure of business interests behind it and because it is impossible for traffic to move with any celerity through streets clogged by carts.

The plan is to build several big markets and rent stalls to the pushcart men. Perhaps some day they will have a board of governors like the Stock Exchange, and the newspapers will note that a seat on the Pushcart Market has changed hands at a new record sum.