A New York City street vendor scrabbles and strives to make a living
A New York City street vendor scrabbles and strives to make a living
Walk or drive through any major city in the U.S. — New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles — and you can see a veritable riot of commerce happening on the sidewalk or parked along the curb. The street vendors offering food, clothing, electronics, jewelry and more are highly visible to passersby, but often invisible to the legal and commercial powers that be.
In New York City, for instance, only a fraction of the thousands of food and merchandise vendors selling on the street can obtain city licenses. And they face a host of challenges from code enforcement, to extreme weather, theft and all the other hazards of the street.
On a crisp fall morning, this reporter headed out from Manhattan across the University Heights Bridge to East Fordham Road in the Bronx.
Weekdays and weekends this busy thoroughfare is crammed with traffic and pedestrians, and vendors —packed in next to each other along the sidewalk — selling everything from sunglasses to cellphone cases, jewelry to hot empanadas and fresh-cut fruit.
A certain place on this sidewalk, on the south side of the street between the Grand Concourse and Valentine Ave., opposite a discount clothing store, is where Vicente Veintimilla sets up his stall every morning. He’s a veteran street vendor, a sort of ambassador for street vendors.
“I am from Ecuador. I am 53 years old, and 46 of them I’ve been on the streets as a street vendor,” Veintimilla said, in an interview conducted in Spanish. “I come from a poor family. At the age of six I went out to sell newspapers, because I had to work.”
Veintimilla’s wife and sons help out with the stall. He says their busy location in the heart of the Bronx is key. “The Fordham Road corridor has advantages: there are stores on both sides, bus stops, subway, Metro North, Fordham University, hospitals nearby. All that makes it a perfect place for the informal market businesses to stimulate the established businesses.”
The stall, about 10 feet across, specializes in Croc charms, the popular little plastic decorations that adorn Croc sandals. Veintimilla has more than 2,000 in stock, selling eight-for-$5. Most popular are characters from “South Park” and “The Simpsons,” and also anything to do with the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico — famous people, favorite foods, baseball teams.
“Maintaining such a varied stock not only requires time, but also money,” said Veintimilla. “We alternate with various goods, otherwise we don’t have a chance.”
Veintimilla’s income varies. Early in the pandemic he was able to make as much as $4,000 a month selling masks and safety supplies. Lately, selling Croc charms, along with a sideline selling collectible coins and currency, he said he earns $1,000 to $2,000 per month.
And he can’t sell all the time. More than once this season, street vending has been rained out.
“All the merchants here, we hope to be able to have an established store one day,” he said. “Because being on the streets, there’s no protection from extreme weather in the winter or summer. There’s no roof over your head in the rain.”
Veintimilla is a leader with New York’s Street Vendor Project, a nonprofit advocacy organization established by the Urban Justice Center, that pushes for legal protections and small-business support for fellow merchants, many of them first-generation immigrants.
“Immigration, along with the pandemic health emergency, has forced many people, including workers who got laid off, to sell on the street,” said Veintimilla. “These people have the potential to be part of the backbone of the economy. When we buy merchandise, we pay our taxes. So we want a proper process with clear rules, that involves us street vendors directly.”
The Street Vendor Project’s director, Carina Gutierrez, estimated that there are currently at least 20,000 food and merchandise vendors operating in New York City, but only about 6,000 city permits available for them (5,100 of those are for mobile food vendors). According to the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, there are only 853 city permits for merchandise vendors like Veintimilla. The city isn’t accepting any new applications, and the waiting list is closed.
Vendor permits can be rented on the secondary market, but they’re expensive and not always legit. Veintimilla said that leaves vendors vulnerable to enforcement action—sometimes prompted by complaints from nearby stores that consider them a nuisance or unfair competition.
“Informal street trade is regulated by the Sanitation Department, and also by the police,” he said. “And the tickets they issue to us — sometimes they’re $250, other times they’re $1,000 — they become unpayable.”
While street vendors are sometimes in conflict with the police, Veintimilla said they also need them: “We are always subject to police control. We aren’t opposed to that: The police do their job, we respect that.”
But he said the role he and his fellow street-sellers play in the urban landscape is not well understood. “Merchants have always been shunned by the authorities, because they associate us in a totally wrong way with all the bad things that are on the streets,” he said. “We merchants are vulnerable to robberies every day. We’ve seen everything: accidents, people being stabbed, street fights, stores looted. This is a particular thing that shapes you as a trader. And when you have 46 years on the street, in different parts of the world, the street-school becomes a university.”
Sometimes it’s a university of hard knocks. Veintimilla and his wife share a small apartment with a roommate, along with their stored merchandise. With heavy rain this fall and winter weather coming on, he said they’ll probably make about $800 in November — not enough to pay the rent.
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