By Adrienne Urbanski
Ever since the Fulton Fish Market moved north to the Bronx two years ago, the South Street Seaport has mourned its loss — but perhaps no one has felt it more personally than artist Naima Rauam, who dedicated much of her life’s work to painting the fishmongers who worked along Lower Manhattan’s cobblestoned waterfront in the hours before dawn.
Starting on November 7, however, the market will return to the Seaport through a commemorative festival organized by Rauam, timed to the 100th anniversary of the Fish Market’s home, the landmark Tin Building, and the centennial birthdays of two tugboats, the Lightship Ambrose and the Tug Pegasus.
Rauam first fell in love with the market as a student at the Art Student’s League in 1965. During an assignment for a drawing class, Rauam decided to try sketching the scene at the fish market, and soon found herself devoting the majority of her assignments to depicting the market.
“I was amazed that everyday on my way to class from the market everyone would get out of my way and give me a seat. Then I realized that I stank like crazy because I wore the same coat to the market everyday. Everything I owned reeked of fish, people would cringe at me. Even my watercolors emanated the smell of fish, I would open up my portfolio and people would recoil.”
Despite the smell, Rauam set up a studio for herself in a stall on Beekman Street, which she shared with Meyer and Thompson’s Smoked Fish Company. In the mornings, while they sold fish on the ground floor, Rauam would sketch and photograph scenes in the fish market, then take them back to the studio in the afternoon and paint from them (hence the tagline still on her website: “Art in the Afternoon (fish in the morning).”
Even her commute was unusually workaday. On her way from her Lower East Side home to the Seaport, she would often hop a ride on a “hilo,” or a forklift truck, which would be gassing up at the corner of East Broadway and Pike Street in the wee hours. All of Chinatown, even the FDR was silent at that time, she recalls, “and then you would come down South Street and hear this clattering and then closer see the bright intense floodlights and hear the guys shouting and the trucks moving around and men wheeling hand carts. It was a very active, vibrant scene surrounded by total darkness. Even the bridges were dark.”
Hearing Rauam speak so vividly of the fish market, it’s easy to see how it remained such a vital inspiration to her work. Even today, she visits the indoor Fulton Fish Market at Hunts Point occasionally. “I’m trying to warm to it,” she says. “I also don’t want to lose touch with the people I’ve become acquainted with.”
But her heart remains in the Seaport, where she still works, now at Pier 17 overlooking her old studio. And next week, she’s inviting New Yorkers to relive the market’s heyday with “Fulton Fish Market Remembered,” a 12-day event held in coordination with different Seaport institutions, from the South Street Seaport Museum, which will be offering free tours of the Ambrose, to Montauk Theatre Productions, which will be performing musical revues that date to 1907, the year the Tin Building was built, at the Space Gallery at 207A Front St., headquarters for the fish market fest. The gallery will host family activities and demonstrations like drawing, wood carving, letterpress printing, and marbles (a popular 1907 game!). Rauam has also installed historic panels and archival materials from the museum, along with her artwork.
“I’ve concentrated on using my art to capture every single aspect of the market,” she said, which will be evident from her display of watercolors, charcoal drawings, and “photoglicees,” photographs that she took and then painted over with watercolors and gouache.
Rauam also decided to include two films that depict life at the marketplace; one from 1953 and one from 2001 to show the way the area changed throughout the years.
“I would like to make this a yearly event to bring back the spirit of the market. It was such a real life, New York experience, and I’m sad it’s gone. This is my attempt to keep the memory alive.”
For more information on the event you can check out Naima Rauma’s website at www.artpm.com or call 212-964-8465.
