Pushcarts once were a common sight in New York. They would line the street, hawking their wares to passersby. For a large number of New Yorkers, the pushcarts served as the grocery stores of the day. You could buy anything from fruit and vegetables to meat and fish to clothes!

For many immigrants fresh off the boat, the pushcarts served as a route to prosperity. Far cheaper than renting a store, pushcarts were a vehicle to owning one's own business. With a small upfront fee, an immigrant could begin selling goods immediately.

Many Jewish immigrants (used to peddling due to Anti-Semitic laws in Europe) were quick to adopt it as a trade. Even Meyer Guggenheim began peddling goods on a pushcart in Philadelphia before becoming one of America's wealthiest men.

While they often lined the street, peddlers would also gather at open-air markets and fair lots across the city. These crowded spaces provided a breadth of different varieties of merchandise for shoppers to peruse and haggle over.

However, these hubs of commerce were not beloved by all. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was elected in 1934 on a cross-party platform and immediately began a reform campaign. Charismatic and popular, LaGuardia also had a domineering, even authoritarian side, and when he set out to do something, he would do everything in his power to get it done.

LaGuardia believed the pushcarts to be a public menace, believing them to be unsanitary, disheveled, and under regulated. Moreover, he thought they crowded streets, increasing congestion and stalling traffic. By the 1930s, there were almost 60 open air markets in the city, and thousands of pushcarts. The "Little Flower", as LaGuardia was called, meant to sweep them from the streets.

One of LaGuardia's first blows was using WPA funds to open indoor retail markets. LaGuardia presides here over the opening in December 1938 of the First Avenue Market, the second in a series of nine public markets.

The new markets were mandated to have running water, rail facilities, and loading platforms. The aim was to replace the open air markets with a contained, sanitary, regulated arena. The same year, LaGuardia passed an ordinance banning all unregistered pushcarts from peddling on the streets.

The vendors within the markets (many of whom who had previous owned pushcarts) sold cheese, vegetables, and a dizzying variety of other products.

Many of the markets LaGuardia created were met with remarkable success. Often (like with the Essex Street Market) they were created specifically to replace open air markets that had existed previously.

In the 1964 book "The Pushcart War", the underdog pushcart owners were able to win a battle over the villains of the novel (the trucking industry.) However, the Pushcart War of the 1930s had a different ending.

LaGuardia dealt a devastating blow to the world of pushcarts. While he was never able to eliminate them entirely, the number of pushcarts on the streets of New York dropped precipitously and the old world crowded streets never returned.