NEW YORK STORIES: South Bronx, 1977—The Truck from Kansas

I’m in a bodega on Hoe Avenue in the Bronx, where the residents of the three apartment buildings I am managing shop for their food. The owner offers a variety of groceries from Puerto Rico and fresh vegetables from other Latin American countries that are difficult to get in the supermarket. The prices are higher than the supermarket but, if you are a steady customer, you can buy on credit. Everyone, including the bodega owner, knows when the welfare checks come in. If he isn’t paid what he’s owed, he cuts off further purchases.

The bodega was one of the “safe houses” I could enter if I needed to get off the street in a hurry. The owner knew I was not representing slumlords and that I was even employing some of his customers. He also made spectacular Cuban sandwiches with his own cooked pork.

One warm summer day a very large refrigerated tractor trailer truck pulled up and stopped in front of the bodega. Hoe Ave is a one-way street, and with cars parked on both sides, the truck blocked the road to all traffic. He came into the store asking if anyone spoke English. Most of the patrons said they did. He wondered if he could get directions. There was no question that he was lost. 

He was on his way to the Hunt’s Point Market, where food from suppliers and wholesalers is distributed to local vendors and stores. Some drivers come in the middle of the night and sleep in their trucks waiting for the market to open. These “overnighters” provide an important labor-intense occupation for the area: prostitution.

But this guy was here at a strange time of day and everyone on Hoe Ave knew it. The market was nearby and easy to get to: “Make a left turn at the light and continue straight.” I wondered why these easy directions weren’t offered. Instead, he was given a cool drink as people searched for paper and pencil to draw a map.

I usually offer no assistance in matters like this as I try to separate myself from the local situation. This one was becoming interesting and I wanted to remain a voyeur. I did notice that some of the people who hang out in the store quietly exited. The rest were debating back and forth about the various directions being suggested. The driver, from Kansas, was a friendly guy who said that this was his first trip into the Hunts Point Market. He had had a very frustrating time finding people who would help him, so that although he appreciated the detailed directions the folks in the store were giving him, he needed to move on as he was blocking the street and possibly holding up traffic. Finally, after many attempts to understand what started out as mildly accented English and was now severely broken English mixed with high speed Puerto Rican Spanish, the driver thanked all, left the store and climbed into his truck.

Something was amiss but I just couldn’t figure out what was going on.

We followed to watch the 60 feet of his trailer move on and stop at the light with his left turn signal on. I was surprised that there were no cars behind the truck and realized that, although he had blocked the street, no loud horns were blaring as I would have expected. I also noticed that Hoe Ave had become empty of its inhabitants, as if they had vaporized.

When the truck stopped at the light, there was a loud metal-on-metal banging. The driver put on his hazard lights and jumped out of the cab to investigate. At the back of his truck, he saw that the banging noise came from the rear doors of the trailer closing on each other. They must have been wide open when he drove forward.

The truck was two-thirds emptied of its frozen cargo, sides of beef weighing up to 200 pounds. When the truck had left Kansas it was full to the brim. All that stalling in the bodega provided time enough for that beef to walk off the truck. 

The police were called. The local precinct was the infamous 41th, also know as Ft. Apache. At the time this police station was famed as the most dilapidated, corrupt, and non-functioning in New York City. At one point during the time of my experience in the area, an angry mob had gathered outside this precinct house to demand police protection and that the police do the work they were paid to do. The mobs’ anger rose to such a frenzy that the police had to barricade themselves in their own station house. Quite an embarrassment. The book Fort Apache by Tom Walker and the less-accurate movie Fort Apache The Bronx starring Paul Newman, Danny Aiello, and Ed Asner, from the 1980s, tell the story of this sad part of the Bronx’s history.   

When the police finally arrived at the scene of the crime, they were amused. How could the driver not know that the South Bronx is no place to walk away from a fully loaded truck? Papers were filled out. The truck driver drove on. 

I, in the meantime, made my way to the subway and to my midtown office.

The next day when I returned to Hoe Ave, I found out some the details of the previous day’s event. It seems that as soon as the truck stopped and the driver entered the store, an orchestrated chain of events began. It was as if a highly trained tactical SWAT team approached its mission. The doors to the truck were quickly opened as the lock just fell apart under a heavy hammer blow. As this was happening someone ran up the street to the next block to divert traffic. When the truck doors were opened and the contents examined, men were sent to bring wheelbarrows, hand trucks, shopping carts, and baby carriages to move the booty to safe places.

This is what was happening in the street. What was going on in the Hoe Ave building basements was an assembly line of workers with power saws cutting up the frozen meat so it could be easily distributed to the community and put in fridges and freezers for sale. No one was in charge of this effort—it just unfolded quickly and without a wrinkle.

And if you were on Hoe Ave that day and didn’t know what had happened the day before, it was just another day in the South Bronx.