The Hunts Point Market; Trucks, Workers, and Neighborhood Health

PUBLISHED April 30, 2025

In 1967, Mayor John Lindsey boasted that “fresh thinking and imagination” would make the Hunts Point Market the largest and most modern food distribution center in the world.

The Hunts Point Market, said Lindsey, would grow on land owned and purchased by New York City. Residents, in turn, would have fresher and less costly foodstuffs.¹

Left unsaid would be the market’s effect on the students at the elementary school just up the hill, or with the people who lived in the pre-war apartments around the corner on Faile Street. And even with the owners of the mom and pop stores lined up along Hunts Point Avenue.

Would air pollution from the truck exhaust cause respiratory problems? Lindsay did not say.

Looking back, Lindsay’s commercial vision of the Hunts Point Market has largely come true. Hunts Point has the largest produce, meat, and fish markets in the nation and is a leading food distributor worldwide, giving the city’s ethnic populations a wide variety of food options to choose from.

Trucks

Logistically, the Hunts Point Market is all about getting trucks in and out as quickly as possible. Transportation planners during Lindsey’s time called this “circulation.”²  Trucks coming off the Bruckner Expressway can either veer right and go into the produce market or they can go straight ahead three blocks along Halleck Street and then turn left on Food Court Road.

The meat market is down Food Court Road on the right and the seafood market is further down on the left. Almost 13,000 trucks a day circulate the Hunts Point Market, enjoying access to wide roads with little or no traffic congestion.

In all three markets, the system works essentially the same: trucks back up to a loading platform where workers take the merchandise off the truck with electric pallet jacks and then leave the pallets on the dock. A second worker comes along with another jack and brings everything into a refrigerator unit across the aisle.  

The produce market takes up the most space—113 acres altogether. It sits behind a 15 foot tall concrete wall fronting Halleck Street. Inside the produce market are four long platforms—labeled A, B, C, and D. Each platform has the same architecture. On one side trucks load and unload their cargo. About 150 trucks can line up along a platform at any one time. On the other side are the glass sales booths and adjacent cooler doors with vinyl strips swaying downward.

The Workers

The most positive energy is on the platform closest to the street entrance, Platform A, right when you walk up the stairs. Flats fill up the aisle with lettuce, peppers, and celery. Electric jacks whiz from here to there and back again. Men, and it is all men, sit casually dressed in the sales booths.

Sadly, one can imagine all the ways a person could injure themselves. A moving pallet coming from the front could ram into their shin bone; a pallet coming up from behind could smash into their heel bone; then again, a jack operator could lower a pallet onto the ground and crush their foot. Or—the wheel of a jack could run over their foot, or—there again, a moving jack could sideswipe the person and bang up their knee.

Few workers, if any, wear steel-toe boots.

Ultimately though, it is the 5,300 employees³ who make the Hunts Point Market a commercial success. They work methodically at maneuvering their electric pallet jacks. Few smile and rarely do they take time off for side conversations or to put a cup of coffee on their jack while going about their work.

But there can be light-hearted moments. In one instance, Worker A picked up what looked to be a squashed cabbage or honey dew melon and got ready to take a basketball shot. Worker B jumped up quickly to block the shot. Worker A made a couple of quick feints and then did a hook shot. The cabbage or melon went into the parking area below. All the while, someone in the background kept hollering, “How old are you? How old are you?”

Neighborhood Health

As for the surrounding community today, Mayor Lindsay probably would have hoped for better. The City’s Community Health Survey reports that Hunts Point has some of the highest asthma rates in the city.

It is not difficult to understand why. Diesel trucks constantly spew out a poisonous cocktail mix of nitrogen oxide, fine particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. 

Only 63% of Hunts Point residents report that their own health is at least “good,” the lowest percentage of any neighborhood in New York City.

One can argue now that the Hunts Street Market has outlived its usefulness. Instead, each borough could have its own individual food market where barges deliver incoming goods as a way to reduce noxious pollutants.

And since the city owns the land on Hunts Point, that could then be turned into affordable housing units with neighborhood libraries and playgrounds.

All of this would take fresh thinking and imagination, but it would make New York City a healthier place to live.

¹John Lindsey, “The Hunts Point Market: Better for the Housewife…Better for Business,” New York Times, May 28, 1967.

²Hunts Point Food Service (New York: Economic Development Association, prepared by Bechtel, May 1968).

³Office of the New York State Comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, Economic Snapshot of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, November 23, 2023.