The hour the city eats by and never sees: a refrigerated hall the length of three blocks, ice going down in mountains, forklifts running the centre aisle with their beacons turning, gulls working the rafters, and the buyers walking the row in headlamps and parkas. The New Yorkers hang on the stall fronts, at the height of a chalked price.
The Fulton Fish Market began in 1822 as one wing of the Fulton Market on the East River waterfront. On November 14, 2005 it left the South Street Seaport after 183 years for a climate controlled hall at Hunts Point in the Bronx, built for about 85 million dollars and covering roughly 400,000 square feet. It is the largest fish market in the United States and second in the world only to Tokyo, and it works through the night.
Source · Fulton Fish Market, Wikipedia ↗
The 400,000 square foot cold hall at Hunts Point, the numbered bays and their roll up doors, stainless display tables banked with crushed ice, waxed boxes stacked to the ceiling, hanging scales, chalkboards, forklift beacons, the truck apron outside, and the gulls that came with the market from South Street. Mood: cold store, before dawn. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.