Meatpacking District Goes Glamorous

New York may be the city that doesn't sleep, but there are certainly times when it at least starts to nod off a little bit--Monday morning at 4 a.m., for instance.

The hour is too close to the beginning of the work week for clubs and bars to be disgorging more than a few dedicated scenesters and alcoholics, and the streets belong mostly to the garbage men and New York Post delivery trucks.

Monday morning at 4 a.m. is, however, rush hour in at least one part of Manhattan: the Meatpacking District, which occupies a handful of blocks around West 14th Street west of Chelsea, between Hudson Street and the Hudson River.

For about a century, the Meatpacking District was precisely what the name implies--the point at which meat and poultry converged upon the city from their far-flung origins across the country. To a certain degree it still is. In the pre-dawn hours a procession of semi-trucks descends on 14th Street, and frozen sides of beef, lamb, and pork are shuttled on meat hooks along the intricate networks of iron rails that jut off the neighborhood's warehouses.

The hundred year-old cobblestone streets that designate the borders of the district have no storm drains, so in wet weather the rainfall collects in pools full of the pungent remains of the day's deliveries. Although practitioners of various nocturnal professions appear less frequently than they did in the pre-Giuliani era, the occasional transvestite prostitute still does surface on occasion in the area.

But in recent years, gentrification has caught up with the Meatpacking District. In Manhattan, where industrial districts are transformed into fashionable neighborhoods with exponentially increasing speed, it was perhaps inevitable that these few blocks of cavernous warehouses would become the epitome of chic. The majority of New York's meat now arrives at Hunt's Point in Brooklyn instead, and many of the Meatpacking District's old warehouses have become über-exclusive clubs and lofts belonging to supermodels and other scions of the attractive elite. A decade ago, buildings in the neighborhood sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars; now the prices are in the tens of millions.

On Washington Street, in the icy early hours of an unseasonably cold April morning, Roger Dubee stands alongside his rig, watching the white coat-clad employees of Lamb Unlimited, Inc. unload several hundred headless lamb carcasses from the back of the truck. "I've been coming to this market for twenty-one years," he says. His lambs come from Greeley, just north of Denver, Colorado, where he lives. The drive to New York, which he makes every other week, takes almost three days; "I leave Friday morning and I get in here Sunday night," he says. "I spend five days here and then five days at home. I'm never home on the weekend--I'm either coming or going."

Now Dubee splits his deliveries between the Meatpacking District and Hunt's Point. "This place has changed a lot," he says. "I imagine they're going to do away with all this industry."

"The market's gone," concurs Jack Green, a solidly built, prodigiously bearded forklift operator at the Food Warehouse on 14th Street.

Green has worked in the Meatpacking District since 1979, and remembers earlier years when the district's streets were full to capacity with trucks and trains delivering meat from the now derelict set of tracks that hangs over the warehouses. Instead of pulling directly up to the buildings as they do now, he says, "the trucks had to park in one spot and then load from there, everything in the market, because you couldn't move in here."

Green points up at the iron tracks running around the building a few feet over his head. "All these meat rails around the corner? They used to have rails everywhere. All the meat was hanging outside and everything."

Although the skeletons of the meat rails remain on some recommissioned buildings as part of a self-consciously faux-industrial image, they have been removed from many others to make way for sleeker facades.

It would be difficult to think of a business that is more the antithesis of the Food Warehouse--utterly utilitarian right down to its name--than the Vitra showroom and store a couple of blocks away on 9th Avenue. The fifty year-old design company, which is based in Switzerland and operates a design museum in Berlin, specializes in office furnishings by high profile designers that carry substantial price tags. The company's Meatpacking District store, which opened in November of 2002, is practically the definition of style, with Vitra furnishings arranged on immense glass shelves behind the all-glass facade, interspersed with paper lanterns and transparent bowls planted with grass. Display copies of glossy architecture books lie open on tables further back in the store.

According to Andrea Loukin, Vitra's New York public relations representative, the Vitra franchise is "the first store in the area of its kind," and the company chose the Meatpacking District location because of the neighborhood's growing reputation as a high fashion mecca.

"[Vitra is] a cutting-edge manufacturer of European design furniture," Loukin says, "and they wanted to be in a place that was up-and-coming, wanted to be downtown, wanted to be the first in the area."

"Because they have a museum in Europe, they have a cache of artistic credibility, a reputation of being very art oriented," she says.

Vitra is, in fact, playing a substantial part in shaping the new Meatpacking District aesthetic; the company is currently working on interior design for the forthcoming high-end hotel located directly above the 9th Avenue store.

While Vitra may be riding the crest of the Meatpacking District's rise to hipness, others who work in the area are less thrilled about the changes taking place. "It's terrible," Green says of the gentrification. "It's just going to be people living here, no place to work. I don't know what I'm going to do then. It's screwed up."

"I've done this so long," Dubee says, "and the traffic is getting worse and worse. It's not good--the city's growing too much."

But for the time being, the Meatpacking District still belongs as much to the meat industry employees as to the hipsters.

Skyrocketing rents haven't yet affected prices at Hector's Restaurant on Little W. 12th St., where a cup of coffee costs less than a dollar and Midwestern truck drivers, hard-hatted USDA inspectors, and Latin American immigrants who work in the warehouses crowd the counter before the sun is even up.

The denizens of the fashion world may flock to the Meatpacking District, but Dubee escapes it when he can. "In the summertime I bring a bicycle," he says. Leaving the semi on 14th Street, he explores New York with a more maneuverable set of wheels on Monday and Tuesday, his days off.

"I'll bet you most of the [truck drivers] have never even seen the city," he says. "They don't even know what the city's like. I mean, the city's cool if you get away from this area. And there's more to life than sitting in a goddamned truck."