Unpacking the market’s history

BY RAANAN GEBERER

The phrase “Meatpacking District,” or just “Meatpacking,” is routinely used nowadays to describe the area roughly between Hudson Street and the Hudson River, 14th and Gansevoort Street. But if you asked the young people coming out of the many boutiques and trendy restaurants there exactly what the term means, chances are that many of them wouldn’t know.

Jacquelyn Ottman, a member of a family whose history in the meat business goes back to the mid-19th century, recently explained the ins and outs of the business as it existed for many years.

During a June 7 lecture sponsored by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, her focus was on her family firm, Ottman and Company, which operated in three buildings whose address is now known as 1-5 Little West 12th St. from 1919 until 1986, when it moved to Massachusetts.

While she is now a green-marketing and sustainability consultant, she grew up working summers in the company. Several of her family members were in the audience, including her father, Jack, who was celebrating his 90th birthday.

To begin with, she said her father and her other older relatives never called the area the Meatpacking District, but just “the Market.” During the mid-19th century, the area was a thriving produce market, but in the 1880s, the city built the West Washington Market, a now-demolished group of brick buildings housing meat and poultry operations, directly across West Street. In 1949, the city built the Gansevoort Market Meat Center, which still houses a handful of meat firms.

Ottman and Company, she told those assembled at the Westbeth Community Room, was basically the descendant of two other firms, although they were spelled “Ottmann.” In 1859, Phillip Ottmann, a German immigrant, founded the company in what became known as the Fulton Fish Market. He brought other family members over, they joined the firm, and it prospered. In 1916, Louis Ottmann, at that time the company’s president, sold the firm, which had been renamed William Ottmann and Company, to the Beinecke family.

Two years later, the elder Jack Ottman (Jacquelyn’s grandfather) decided to open his own meat business. But the Beineckes owned the original name, so, she recounted, he dropped the new name’s final “n.” The firm provided beef, lamb, pork and veal to hotels, restaurants and other high-end customers. Some of these included the Stork Club, the 21 Club, Luchow’s and Le Pavilion.

Originally, Ottman said, cattle from points west were transported on barges that traversed the Hudson River to the stockyards in the general area of today’s Hudson Yards. They were slaughtered, with carcasses put onto freight cars and transported via the High Line to the “Market.” The reason sides of beef were always hung from hooks, she added, is that if you put them down on the floor horizontally, the weight of the bones would crush and ruin the meat.

After World War II, Ottman continued, there was a change in the business. Meat could now be vacuum-packed and packaged air-tight in Cryovac, a thin plastic material. Then, in the 1960s, beef packers in Iowa realized that they didn’t have to send the cows to New York to be slaughtered — they could slaughter them there, process the meat into cuts, pack it into boxes and ship it to New York in refrigerated 18-wheelers. Subsequent deliveries mainly brought boxed beef, rather than whole sides.

Another change, Ottman said, came when many restaurants no longer had butchers on their staffs, and wanted pre-cut steaks and chops. So Ottman and Company trimmed some of its meat and cut it, with the aid of a bandsaw, into exact portions. Then, these ready-to-cook portions were vacuum-packed in another plastic material known as DuPont Bivac and frozen to 60 degrees below zero within two seconds.

“We worked with Clarence Birdseye himself to develop a technique of freezing beef without getting ‘freezer burn,’” Ottman said. Birdseye, in the 1920s, discovered how to freeze fish and vegetables, and Birds Eye frozen foods are still a popular brand today.

Ottman and Company also pioneered a “Chef Ready” line of pre-cooked meats, mainly roasts, that were ready to be heated in an oven. They came with their own thermometers.

Ottman and her father told some interesting stories about the company. After a certain point in time, the meat had to go through a metal detector. American Airlines, which used Ottman meats, had found a bullet in one of their steaks. This was a rare occurrence.

They also talked about the huge orders of boxed steaks sent to Saudi princes through a distributor. These steaks were packed in refrigerated shipping containers that were plugged into a power source so they could survive the 30-day ocean voyage to Saudi Arabia.

After the company moved to Massachusetts, Ottman concluded, it was sold to a larger firm. Today, 75 percent of the meat sold in the U.S. comes from about five companies. The ground-floor space in the former Ottman building is now occupied by the upscale restaurant Bagatelle.

Someday, she said, the galleries, boutiques and restaurants of the Meatpacking District will go the way of the meat-processing plants. And when a new breed of businesses move in, she said, they well may be inspired by the spirit of innovation that characterized Ottman and Company.