Around midnight on a frigid Wednesday in December, New York’s Hunts Point Market was charged with the kind of constant, kinetic energy one would expect from the largest food distribution center in the world. Across a loading dock, a young man pushed a hand truck piled high with boxes of Brazilian mangoes. In the other direction, a quarter-ton of Idaho potatoes zipped past on a forklift. A frenzy of boots and wheels pulverized spilled strawberries into a dark pool of liquid fruit. Under the bright fluorescent lights, giant towers of mandarin oranges from California, blueberries from Chile, and bell peppers from the Netherlands swiftly disappeared into nearby trucks. The scale of the vast refrigerated storerooms was otherworldly; one warehouse held enough onions seemingly to supply an entire civilization.



In the seafood terminal, fresh perch from Egypt, caught in the Nile, arrived on ice. Men in rubber pants and knee-high boots deftly hoisted the fish onto cutting tables with metal hooks, while restaurateurs and fishmongers roamed the stalls, making deals with fistfuls of cash. In a glass-windowed office overlooking the docks, five clean-shaven men in sweaters sipped mugs of coffee behind computer monitors, keeping tabs on the chaos.

All told, 8,000 people work inside this sprawling 329-acre campus. Each year, 3.3 billion pounds of produce from 49 states and 55 countries pass through Hunts Point Market. Twenty-four hours a day, a fleet of 13,000 trucks disperses this food across the New York region, serving upwards of 22 million people within a 50-mile radius. As much as half of New York’s produce, meat, and fish flows through Hunts Point before arriving at supermarkets, bodegas, food trucks, school cafeterias, restaurants, and soup kitchens across the five boroughs. “You hear people say New York is a melting pot, with world-class ethnic cuisine,” said Vincent Pacifico, the owner of Vista Food Exchange Inc., a large meat company at Hunts Point. “It all comes from the market.”

For half a century, Hunts Point has stood as a marvel of the modern global supply chain, a grand hub that allows New Yorkers to enjoy everything from dim sum to keftedes to bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches, morning, noon, and night. At its ground-breaking in 1962, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner called the new market a “dream come true.” The New York Times heralded it as a “paradise of convenience.” But the market is also the thing that may ultimately grind the city to a halt.

As global temperatures rise and the Antarctic ice sheet melts, scientists predict sea levels could increase by as much as six to eight feet by the end of the century, submerging large swaths of lower Manhattan and the outer boroughs. Long before that, the warmer temperatures will continue to create stronger and more extreme weather events, like Hurricane Sandy, which pummeled New York in October 2012. Sandy was initially considered a 100-year storm. But for New York, the probability of another extreme flooding event increases every year. Under today’s conditions, a storm like Sandy will strike once every 25 years. By 2030, scientists expect an extreme storm to hit New York once every five years. With enough sea-level rise, the threat of the next hurricane raises the alarming possibility of a towering wall of water sweeping inland from the Atlantic Ocean, down the Long Island Sound, and toward the city.