Ray Pelowski heard someone breaking into his trailer of hanging meat at Hunt’s Point Market in New York City. He backed the trailer up to try to shake the man off. The intruder came up to Pelowski, but didn’t see that he was holding a meat hook behind his back. “I hit him in the head with it,” Pelowski says. “Real hard, too. He fell down. I don’t know if he lived or died. The cop told me just to leave. He said, ‘It’s too much work for us to fill out a report. We’ll mark this one DOA.'”
That incident was in the 1970s, and Pelowski says he doesn’t feel scared coming into Hunt’s Point anymore. The neighborhood around Hunt’s Point has been cleaned up a lot since then, he says. Also, he’s been delivering here since 1956, so he has figured out ways to stay safe.
“I think guys ask for it, flashing their money to the whores,” Pelowski says. “I don’t answer my door.” He adds that he’s had his lock broken two other times at Hunt’s Point. “But the load was on pallets, so they couldn’t get it,” he says. He currently hauls barbecued ribs into New York and Chinese noodles back to his home state of Minnesota for Northwest Dairy Forwarding Co., of Ham Lake, Minn.
Getting robbed or mugged is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hauling to big cities. Traffic, tolls, regulations and dealing with rude cops and four-wheelers can make urban driving a big headache for truck drivers.
While rush-hour traffic was rated worst in Los Angeles, followed by San Francisco, in a recent study by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, New York seems to stand head-and-shoulders above other cities when it comes to driver complaints.
Stories like Pelowski’s are spread and perhaps sometimes embellished over the CB; they have given Hunt’s Point legendary status as a den of evil in the trucking world. The Bronx market has become emblematic of New York City trucking.
“You’d rather go into Sing Sing Prison than Hunt’s Point Market,” says Herby Kerr, a 73-year-old driver for Kerr Trucking of Harmony, Maine. “The best thing you can have in New York is a Rottweiler.” It’s not just the threat of violence that bothers Kerr, but the greed. “You’ve got to buy your way out of everything out there. Give him 10, 15 bucks and you get unloaded. Everything has a price.”
