Where’s the beef? Not in the Meatpacking District.
One of Manhattan’s last bona fide butchers, celebrated steak purveyor to the stars Pat La Frieda, said he’s moving to New Jersey this fall, joining dozens of wholesale meat businesses that have left the area in the past decade.
Another is retiring this week, which leaves one city-owned co-op as the final remaining location in the Meatpacking District that actually houses meatpackers.
“A lot of people would like to see us out of here. We don’t fit no more,” La Frieda said as he gestured toward the luxury apartments that have sprouted around his warehouse just south of the district.
The third-generation butcher, who counts celebrity chefs Mario Batali and Danny Meyer among his 1,000 clients, has been in the neighborhood for 30 years.
But La Frieda no longer feels welcome, with noise complaints from ritzy neighbors piling up and city-issued tickets during loading and unloading totaling $84,760 last year.
Actress Eva Mendes and one of the Olsen twins, who briefly owned a penthouse across the street, were among the star-studded cast of complainers, La Frieda’s son Pat Jr. claimed.
The La Frieda warehouse was put on the market for $31 million last month, and boutique hoteliers Ian Schrager and Peter Moore have expressed interest, Sotheby’s broker Robson Zanetti said.
North of La Frieda, M&W Meatpacking, the last freestanding wholesale butcher in the district, is closing this week. Dean & DeLuca, the gourmet market, is moving in, according to a source.
In its heyday, 250 wholesale butchers chopped meat within the dozen blocks officially known as the Gansevoort Market. By 2003, as men in snug tennis sweaters started outnumbering those in bloodstained aprons, the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation counted just 35 butchers.
In the past year, at least nine meatpackers quietly moved out.
Most have moved to The Bronx or New Jersey, like La Frieda, who has a warehouse under construction in North Bergen.
“The mom-and-pop places, they’re getting killed by these big, huge meatpacking warehouses out in New Jersey, upstate,” Mike Skolimowski, a former manager at Lamb Unlimited, lamented as he moved equipment out of a shuttered Washington Street warehouse recently sold for $40 million to a developer who plans to bring in beauty retailers.
As for the lack of the district’s namesake businesses, “It doesn’t make a difference to me. I didn’t even know this area existed four years ago until I came,” said Mario Cameron, controller for the warehouse’s new owner, Robert Isabell.
The exodus leaves only seven butchers in the district, all inside a city-owned co-op with a lease set to expire in 2014.