Charlie Marino stood behind the checkout counter with his chin bent into a thick hooded sweatshirt. He held a pen in one hand and kept the other nestled in his front pocket.
When the telephone rang, he answered in a hushed voice. “Marino’s,” he said, his bloodshot blue eyes flitting up from the open ledger. It was a few minutes after 8 a.m., and Marino & Sons Grand Fish Market was open for business.
Outside on the busy stretch of 30th Avenue, the people of Astoria hustled westward, heels clopping. They filed by the store window, past rows of porgies and snappers, bass and orata glinting on beds of ice. Most didn’t look in, and Marino didn’t look out. Five blocks ahead, trains rumbled toward Manhattan and the start of the workday.
With rising food and gas costs, high unemployment numbers and a weaker dollar, many Americans today are feeling the pinch, and Marino is no exception. Over the past decade, his business has shrunk by 30 percent in total sales.
Marino had been awake for hours. By 4 a.m., he’d already commuted the 47 miles from his home in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, to the southern fringe of the Bronx. Before dawn, he’d sorted through the bounty of seven seas, shipped from two hemispheres and 16 time zones at the New Fulton Fish Market at Hunts Point, the world’s second-largest fish market.
Marino chose carefully. At 49, he’d been in the business for decades, but sometimes he felt like a rookie. Fish, once a staple of the local diet, no longer holds the same a place at the center of the dinner plate.
The words "for sale" were written on a pink piece of construction paper taped to the window of the fish market on Broadway Avenue in Astoria, Queens. Inside, Daniel Berez, 18, was wrapping up a pound of shrimp for a customer. He said the owner had to sell the store because he couldn't keep up with the rent. "I don't know if we'll relocate. I don't know what will happen to me or my job," said Berez, who makes $400 a week working six days a week. "I guess I could always go back to waiting tables." With two other shops closing on the block, how much time will pass before other small businesses face similar fates?
—Candy Cheng
Astoria itself has changed since Marino’s great-grandfather Benny, an immigrant from Sicily, opened the business in 1932 during the Great Depression. The Mexican, Bangladeshi and Ecuadorian population has now surpassed the once Greek and Italian majority in the neighborhood, according to the 2000 census. But Marino & Sons still caters to that dwindling old world population, specializing in whole Mediterranean fish and European delicacies like octopus and squid.
As younger and more diverse residents move into the Astoria neighborhood, one of Marino’s most difficult tasks is coming up with new ways to compete in the market while trying to keep some of the family’s 76 years of traditions.
“Everyone is busy these days,” he said. “Everyone wants everything fast."
