Popular UES Produce Stand Has Goods Taken by Cops; Owner Seeks Answers

A popular produce stand on the Upper East Side is facing legal issues regarding its fruit and veggies. It’s not that the food is tainted in some way or that the stand is operating without the right paperwork. Instead, the longtime produce stand on the corner of 81st Street and First Avenue is getting penalized for keeping boxes of produce on the sidewalk.

The reason? It’s not quite in the right place.

The owner of the produce stand, a New Yorker by way of Bangladesh named Mohammad, was confronted April 9 by police and members of the sanitation department. According to Mohammad, the officers came by, saw that the boxes of produce were not under the stand in a way that followed city code, and wrote him a $25 ticket.

The ticket was for violating Section 17-315(c) of the NYC Administrative Code- Health Provision- Title 17. The description reads, “Items not in/under cart except waste . . . ” It goes on to say that Mohammad (was) “keeping/storing raw fruit or vegetables in/on Box, Crates outside of the space of the pushcart or vehicle.” Mohammad, who has been in the business of street-corner produce for nearly three decades, took issue with this.

“I can’t hang the food up all over the stand,” he said, pointing out the rafters already full of oranges to an Our Town reporter. Instead, what he and many other produce-stand owners do is keep the food that cannot fit on the stand in boxes just in front of where the food is displayed. But that’s not the part that got Mohammad angry. In fact, he has been ticketed for the same thing four times in the last year, most recently in December.

“I don’t care about a twenty-five-dollar ticket. It could be a hundred-dollar ticket,” he said. What set him off was the confiscation of the produce for which he was ticketed. According to him, the police and the sanitation department workers classified the boxed food on the ground as garbage and took it away, loading it onto a truck.

A post on the sub-Reddit, r/uppereastside, from April 9 claimed that the NYPD was “shutting down and confiscating all the fruit and vegetables” from Mohammad due to incorrect paperwork. A photo shows officers loading up a flatbed truck full of produce from Mohammad’s stand. Commenters expressed frustration and anger at the NYPD.

“I know of no law that says they can do that,” Mohammad told Our Town.

Mohammad has all the right paperwork. He has an A on his health-standard placard. He showed a reporter from Our Town his forms for the garbage service that comes to collect the stand’s waste. Both the placard and the garbage-collection form are up-to-date, with the garbage form clearly showing that the service comes every day, as the letter of each day on the form is marked with an X.

“They say, ‘This is garbage.’ I said no, it’s not. They just took it. They don’t care!” Mohammad stressed to Our Town that he, like many other vendors throughout the city, gets his food from the massive Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx. The 113-acre market, which serves over 20 million New Yorkers yearly, is the hub for nearly all of the food that makes its way to produce stands across the city. Mohammad reckons he has $5,000 worth of Hunts Point produce at his stand at any given time.

His previous tickets can possibly be explained one of two ways. First, through the “vendor crackdown” pursued by the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, which has issued nearly 10,000 tickets since 2023. The other is by way of a name-worthy competitor, Morton Williams. Across the street from Mohammad, the Morton Williams supermarket has been at its location since at least 2010 and has proved to be an issue for Mohammad, its street-based competition.

Mohammad believes the supermarket called police on him. “I think so? I never know.” Though he cannot be sure, he believes the Morton Williams takes issue with him selling food at a much cheaper price. The employees and management have never confronted him on the matter. “You see this mango?” he said. “One dollar. These bananas? They [Morton Williams] say two for a dollar, I say five for a dollar. They don’t like me? Maybe. I don’t know.”

Some people posting on the r/uppereastside site also suspected the supermarket chain had called in an anonymous complaint.

Our Town contacted Morton Williams on First Ave and East 81st Street, and a person named Mario, who identified as the manager, said the store had not called in a complaint. “It wasn’t I,” said Mario, who declined to give his last name. “Just Mario is good enough,” he said. Asked if someone else had called besides himself, he said: “No, sir.”