Supplying food to urbanites involves a complicated network of farms, processors and manufacturers, transportation systems, and final distribution from warehouses and wholesalers to the local stores. Most of the enormous process isn’t generally a matter of urban policy, but distribution certainly is. Before the Civil War, American cities were often characterized by centralized, municipal food provisioning.
Cities like New York operated sophisticated and “tightly managed municipal marketplaces to ensure the proper provisioning of residents,” writes historian Gergerly Baics. Food was considered a public good, “to be sustained by active government involvement” in “fair trade practices and basic standards of food quality.”
Baics examines the situation in New York, meaning Manhattan, where a municipal marketplace system existed between 1790 and 1860. “The three parties of the municipal model […] all kept their gaze on the daily transaction of food vendors and customers,” Baics writes.
“Market officials were assigned to monitor everyday retail practices and quality to enforce the market laws’ standards; vendors constantly kept an eye on each other to protect their businesses from unfair competition; and customers, on their part, compared the same provisions across different retailers.”
It was initially the regulation of the fresh meat trade—only licensed butchers could sell veal, beef, lamb, mutton, and pork from municipal marketplaces—that gathered or agglomerated food retailers to these city marketplaces dotting lower Manhattan. All the other vendors wanted to be near the butchers for a simple reason: before refrigeration, meat was generally bought for that day’s use, and shoppers, not unlike today, liked to get everything they needed from one convenient place.
From 1790 to the mid-1820s, New York’s population grew from around 30,000 to more than 150,000. At first, the city’s Common Council expanded public market infrastructure to accommodate the growing demand and the spread of residents and real estate. For example, Washington Market on the west side of lower Manhattan was set up in 1812; Essex Street in what later became the Lower East Side had a covered marketplace by 1818.
The growing city was resulting in longer distances to markets for customers, but this was initially offset by the time savings inherent in making all purchases in one location.
This system only worked, Baics argues, if the “principles of dispersal and agglomeration were consistently kept in balance with urban growth.” It began to slowly unravel when city officials stopped allocating “adequate resources to guarantee its proper functioning.” Changing municipal priorities and the consequent slackening of social investment meant the food provisioning infrastructure couldn’t keep pace with urban growth.