Author Pete Hamill Discusses Treasure Hunting

"You can't know anything, unless you walk," said Pete Hamill, 73, author of "Downtown: My Manhattan." "You think of one thing and it leads you to another."

The seasoned New Yorker and writer came to share his treasures of
experiencing the city with my NYU class. He shared a few tips on how
he finds the treasures for his stories.

A novelist and journalist, Hamill discussed his secret to writing about downtown Manhattan- experiencing the city yourself.

"You take with you what you know," said Hamill. "That's your basic template."

Having lived in New York City for most of his life, Hamill is able to bring to life the history behind many places people just walk past.

He sees writing as a type of music, turning the sentences in his pieces into musical pieces. He transforms his words into rhythm.

"Every piece has music if it's good," Hamill explains.

He suggests exploring by yourself, surrounding yourself with the story. And that some of that story, that music, is yourself.

Street Vendor Treasures

“There’s a woman who sells these tea cakes on Canal St,” Sean Basinski, 36, said of his favorite New York City street vendor. “They are ten for a dollar and really warm up your day.”

Treasures like this woman's tea cakes are what Basinski seeks to preserve with his Street Vendors Project, an initiative to change the image of the street vendor by cultivating and organizing street vendors.

The Street Vendor Project focuses on a few goals – increasing the number of permits for street vendors, opening up more streets, reducing fines for minor violations, and smoothing the relation between law enforcement and the street vendors.

“It’s sort of like a union. We believe in collective action,” Basinski said. “Our adversary is the city.”

According to the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, who issues the licenses, there are 853 licenses for those who sell non-food products and there are 3,000 licenses for food vendors. These permits are capped, meaning the waitlist for permits is increasingly long and has resulted in a black market for permits.

According to Basinski, it is completely legal for an owner to have someone else work their booth, which makes it close to impossible for law enforcement to crack down on those who have sold their permits.

Basinski hopes that by increasing the number of permits available, this injustice of black market sales will end.

Currently, a lot of street vendors are prohibited from operating in certain areas. According to Basinski, lot of businesses have helped put laws into action that have decreased the street areas open to vendors. His project would like to see this reversed and create more space for vendors.

The fines that the street vendors face are also a huge problem, according to Baskinski. It is $50 for the first offense and $1,000 for the sixth offense. These fines can really start to add up and hinder the profits of the vendors.

“There are all kinds of little rules,” Basinski said. “You have to be 20 feet from an entrance to a building, 10 feet from a cross walk, etc.”

The Street Vendor Project also seeks to smooth out the relationship between the police force and the vendors. Basinski believes the vendors should be more thoroughly taught the rules and the law enforcement should be informed of why some of the rules are commonly broken.

“It’s a huge waste of police force to have people trying to work treated like criminals,” said Basinski.

Basinski hopes that under his leadership these goals can be worked on in the Street Vendor Project. And how does he know so much about the problems facing street vendors?

“I sold burritos at Park and 52nd St,” admitted Basinski.

Fruity Treasures becoming Expensive Treasures?

“It’s a hard life,” admits Yong Chen, who operates a fruit stand on the sidewalks of Canal Street in New York City. “The price of everything has gone up!”

Chen hopes to keep his prices low (it’s only a $1.30 for a pound of seedless grapes), but in order to make a profit he is thinking about having to raise prices.

“I’ve never really raised my prices,” he said. “I try to cater to my customers.”

However, Chen said that the price of fruit has gone up since he first became a fruit vendor after coming to the United States with his family 25 years ago from China.

Chen buys his fruit at Jetro Cash and Carry, a large warehouse that sells fresh produce at wholesale prices in Brooklyn. He would prefer to shop at the one in Hunts Point in the Bronx where he says the fruit is cheaper. However, that might mean a one to two hour drive for him and lots of gas.

Chen already has enough driving to do. He has to get to Brooklyn every morning at to buy the fruit and be back early enough set up his stand in a good location.

“It’s very hard to get a spot on Canal Street,” he said. Sometimes if he is late, he gets a place along the cross streets.

Chen said he feels that by raising his prices, he will be able to cover his costs more efficiently. He worries, however, that it will make him less competitive against the other vendors on Canal Street.

The good thing, Chen notices, is that there is still a large price difference between his products and the ones in the grocery stores. A pound of grapes in the grocery stores can sell for around $3. He has that competitor beat!

Treasure Round Up

Chinatown in the Media:

Art mimics life. These little treasures have their heart and soul based in New York's Chinatown.

Grand Theft Auto, a popular video game series, is releasing a new edition called Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars. The game, which will release for the Nintendo DS this winter, is set in Liberty City, a spoof on New York City. Continuing in Grand Theft Auto style, it will feature crime and corruption within a crime syndicate.

The Year of the Fish is a new movie that is coming out. It tells the story of a girl, an undocumented immigrant from China, who must work hard after refusing to perform “favors” at a massage parlor. She finds solace in a magical fish. The entire film was shot in Chinatown with real actors and locations and then drawn over to seem animated. It opens Friday, Oct. 3 in the Angelika Film Center on Houston.

Food in Chinatown

There's no better art than food! And food in Chinatown is the best treasure of all. Below are some great ways to get introduced to food in Chinatown.

Taste of Chinatown, an outdoor food festival will be held Oct. 11 from 12pm – 6pm. It will feature some of the best restaurants and shopping. Tasting stands are all around the heart of Chinatown, located on Mott, Mulberry, Baxter, Bayard, Pell, and Mosco. Selections of Cantonese, Vietnamese, Japense, Thai, and other East Asian foods will be available. The best thing? $1 to $2 plates! For photos from last year, check out this blog.

Food tourism has become popular in the US and tourists (and New Yorkers!) flock to Chinatown to taste. Companies like Foods of New York Tours offer tours through Chinatown. Tours cost around $50 dollars per person. Most tours are limited to small groups and offer multiple stops along the way. A study in 2007 suggests that 27 million Americans make culinary activities a priority on their vacation.

Shopping in Chinatown

We all love looking for treasures for our wardrobe. Here's a bit of a treasure map to get started on finding that prize collection!

More and more boutiques are popping up in Chinatown. Since rent rates are lower in Chinatown than in a lot of places in the city, many trendy or vintage fashion and art stores are moving in. Places like Coco Fashion, Girls Love Shoes, and other fashion stores make Chinatown a tiny mecca for hidden treasures. What girl doesn’t love vintage YSL shoes for $75?

A Little History

No one buries treasures in a place without history. Finding a place with history is key in exploring. Things change; that’s what makes them interesting.

Chinatown, like most of Manhattan, thrived on change. What fed this change were the immigrants who called the area home. Just north of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in the 1600s, Chinatown was originally a Native American settlement known as Werpoes Hills. It was located by a pond, which became to be known as Collect Pond. The Dutch used to picnic here and go ice skating.

The first immigrants to this area were the freed African Americans. Tanners and Candle makers set up shop in the area since it was located between the harbor and a pond. Collect Pond began to “collect” a certain stench from waste of the industries around it and a canal was dug to alleviate the problem. The Canal was soon covered and turned into a street, aptly named Canal Street. Collect Pond was covered with the dirt from the canal.

The colony of African Americans began to move further north and in came the Irish immigrants. They were fleeing the famine in Ireland and worked menial jobs in their new city. The land fill over Collect Pond began to sink and smell bad, creating a poverty striken neighborhood. Known as “Five Points,” due to the five streets that intersected there, the area became infamous for its gangs and murders.

The Germans settled to the East of the area. The next immigrants were the Jews, Greeks and Italians. They built synagogues, restaurants, and homes.

Many Chinese immigrants flooded San Francisco and the Califonia coast to work on the building of the transcontinental railroad. Non-Chinese in the area feared for their jobs and enacted laws to restict their immigration. Once the railroad was completed, the Chinese left California and traveled cross country to New York in hopes of a more peaceful environment.

But the laws grew even stricter, banning wives and children of Chinese immigrates. This created a “bachelor society” filled with plenty of leisure activities. These included theatres, opium dens, and gambling rings.

“Tongs,” which were merchant or trade organizations, began to rise in power. They protected their members commercially and personally. These tongs developed territories and supported themselves with gambling houses.

The 1960s saw a huge Chinese immigration due to changes in law. Women and children could now come to the States. The tongs became more powerful and recruited younger. They also became more violent.

However, reform efforts at end of 1990s stopped violent nature of the tongs.

Chinatown is filled mostly with a Chinese population, however more and more immigrants from surrounding Asian countries have made the area home. Sixty percent of the population is foreign born. Restaurants, jewelry stores, banks, fabric stores, green grocery stands, and fish markets are all major businesses in the area today.

Today, tourists come to the area to eat Chinese food shop for fake purses, watches, and perfumes on Canal Street.

Beneath that layer, lay the treasures of the past – the still standing synagogues and the old tea parlors – and the treasures of today – the off the main road restaurants, the alternative medicine stores, and the Chinese bakeries.

Welcome!

I am naturally curious about things. I wander. I make my own tours. I investigate. But most importantly I stubbornly insist on walking. The best explorers must travel, and the longer the travel time, the higher probability of finding something great. Marco Polo didn’t take the express train, did he?

Most of my finds, therefore, occur on my walks from NYU to my downtown home. This familiar stroll takes me on a journey through Chinatown, the great onion of historical layers.

I never belonged any where but Manhattan. When most of my friends back in Texas began looking at colleges, they looked for tradition, large campuses, and football teams. My thoughts were different. Where can I explore? Where can I observe? Where can I learn on my own? What can I experience? I already knew. I was going to be a Journalism Major at NYU.

I thrive on the ability to walk the streets and end up somewhere, anywhere. Manhattan continues to leave me surprises. They are hidden between familiar buildings, a small turn off a regular street, or just around the corner. In Chinatown, I am always a treasure hunter.

I once told someone that I love it here because everything that was, now is. There are a hundred cities here. If it once was a mansion, it is now a school building. If it once was an office building, it is now someone’s home. The treasures of the city lie in these layers, resting in the memories of those who knew them and in the gold plated signs left on their new existences.

Every great explorer seeks to show the world his or her finds, and I am no less. Welcome to my museum of Chinatown treasures.