The Pushcart War

I came across a recent prompt asking “what is your favorite book about NYC?” Mine is the The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill (1964), a children’s book I first red in 4th grade and probably my first exposure to New York City. The book has plenty of fans, its own New Yorker profile from 2014, and a home video of Lin-Manual Miranda reviewing the book (some twenty years before Hamilton). It covers a fictional war between pushcart operators and truck drivers in Manhattan. From Wikipedia:

Several characters were based on real-life friends and people. Solbert [illustrator] recalled that when she and Merrill [author] were living in the East Village in the early 1960s on 10th Street near Tompkins Square Park, the New York City Parks Department proposed to cut down trees and remove tables used by neighborhood citizens in favor of a Little League field. The novel was dedicated to Mary Nichols, a journalist for The Village Voice who led the Citizens Committee for the Preservation of Tompkins Square Park. Mayor Cudd was based on then-mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. and a neighbor who repaired pushcarts, Mr. Ammerman, was immortalized as Maxie Hammerman, the Pushcart King.

The book covers the chaos of NYC traffic, the politics of asymmetrical warfare, media, and the spontaneous uprising of citizenry (and children, a great way to endear a book to a child) against corrupt industry. It’s a wonderful story which I am looking forward to introducing to the next generation very soon. My only gripe is that the events of the story, initially set 10 years after the initial 1964 publication, has been updated to be set in 2026. In my memory and heart it will always be set in 1976.

6/11/2024 post-script: searching online for historic images of pushcarts lead to the discovery of this 1916 census of pushcart vendors operating in Manhattan: