Joel Holland
Joel Holland and David Dodge are the creators of the new book NYC Street Vendors: Food Trucks, Coffee Carts, Market Stalls, and More. Their other books include NYC Storefronts. They both live in New York City.
Q: What inspired you to create NYC Street
Vendors?
A: This is the third book we’ve worked on together, and it felt like a natural evolution of the series. The first two books focused on brick-and-mortar small businesses in Manhattan. Street vendors are arguably the city’s most visible small businesses, so focusing on them felt like a natural step.
We’ve always thought of these books as a celebration of small businesses, and street vendors are the smallest of the small. They’re also deeply tied to the identity of the city—so it felt like an obvious, and important, next step.
David Dodge
Q: How did you choose the vendors to include in the book?
A: This was definitely the hardest part! There are roughly 23,000 street vendors in New York City, and we could only include 150.
We started with the ones we personally know and love, but quickly realized that wouldn’t be enough to capture the full picture. So we expanded outward, leaning on our personal networks, crowdsourcing suggestions online, and doing a lot of independent research.
One challenge is that, unlike brick-and-mortar businesses, many street vendors don’t have much of an online presence, so finding some of them and learning their stories took a bit more work.
While the end result is by no means a comprehensive look at street vendors in New York, we tried to do our best to showcase the breadth and diversity of street vendors in New York. That included food vendors, who make up the vast majority, around 20,000 of the 23,000 total, and who come from roughly 60 different countries.
But interestingly, there are many others the city classifies as vendors, including street performers, artists, chess players, Elmo and Elsa in Times Square, and preachers — people who are selling art of a type of service and are just as much a part of the street ecosystem.
Ultimately, to be included in the book, we had two main criteria: the subject needed to have something visually interesting for Joel to draw, and there needed to be a compelling story behind it for David to write about. A lot of favorites didn’t make it simply because they didn’t meet both.
Q: Were the illustrations created before the text or vice versa—or were they created simultaneously?
A: The process has evolved across the three books. For the first Manhattan book, it really started as Joel’s passion project. During COVID, he began drawing his favorite storefronts and posting them online as a way to bring attention to small businesses that were struggling.
That caught the attention of our editor, Ali Gitlow from Prestel, who suggested turning it into a book. She then brought David in to write the text. So that first book is very much an homage to Joel’s personal favorites, many of which he had already illustrated.
For the Brooklyn and Street Vendors books, however, we didn’t have a stockpile of Joel’s drawings to start from. So the three of us (Joel, David, and Ali) suggested our favorite places, gathered recommendations through our networks, crowdsourced ideas online, and researched additional ones.
Once we landed on a list, David would first make sure there was enough to write about before Joel would move forward with his drawings.
Q: What do you think the book says about street vendors in New York City?
A: At its core, the book is a celebration of small businesses, of street life, and especially of immigrant entrepreneurship. About 96 percent of street vendors in New York City are immigrants, so you really can’t tell the story of street vendors without telling a story about immigration and the incredible diversity immigrants bring to the city.
We hope the book helps people recognize how central these vendors are to daily life. Everyone has their go-to coffee cart, fruit stand, halal cart, or lunch spot. These are relationships we all build as New Yorkers over years, and this book ideally will give readers a deeper look into their livelihoods.
At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the challenges vendors face. Up until the end of last year, New York City only allowed 6,880 permits for mobile food vendors and 853 licenses for general merchandise vendors — despite there being 23,000 in the city.
That means roughly 65 percent of street vendors were forced to operate without a permit. For many, fines became just a cost of doing business. That tension—between how essential vendors are and how precarious their work can be—is part of the story too.
The book is coming out at a particularly meaningful moment, though. After decades of organizing, led by the Street Vendor Project, a community organizing group founded in 2001 made up of over 2,000 street vendors, New York City is now in the process of expanding the number of available permits significantly. Within a few years, there will be 27,000 food vendor permits.
It’s a major shift, and it felt important to capture this community at a moment when things may finally be changing in a positive way.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Nothing formally in the pipeline at the moment, but we’ve loved working on this series together and definitely hope to continue collaborating in the future.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Like the previous books, this is really meant to be something you can carry with you and engage with the city differently. We hope readers will discover something new and seek them out, or learn something new about some vendors you might frequent or pass by every day.
And, in keeping with the spirit of the project: if you do pick it up, we’d always encourage buying it from a local bookstore.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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