By Nicole Breskin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
SOUTH STREET SEAPORT – Artist Naima Ruuam can still smell the fish.
Fulton Fish Market left the seaport four years ago. But Ruuam, 63, still has visceral memories of it.
Most of all, she remembers what the fish looked like in the middle of the night under the bright lights of the busy market.
“They almost looked like parrots,” she recalls. “They were turquoise and yellow, and pink and blue. Under the lights, they just gleamed.”
Hundreds of pounds of whole tuna fish, exotic red-spotted Hawaiian opah and the fisherman who heaved and cut them are among the inspirations for Ruuam's artwork for her latest exhibition.
Remembering the Fulton Fish Market is on display now until Nov. 22 at 210 Front Street off South Street Seaport.
The artwork depicts the Fulton Fish Market when it was located near South Street Seaport and the Brooklyn Bridge. It had been at that spot for more than 180 years – before it was displaced to Hunts Point in the Bronx by the city in 2005.
“It was all lit up,” Ruaam, 63, recalls. “You would walk up these desolate streets, and there it would be – an enclave of activity. It was very different then.”
Ruuam first ventured to the fish market in 1965 for her art school homework to capture an action scene.
“I found plenty of action,” Ruuam said. “It could be three degrees out, or 90 degrees and the workers would do the same hard work. But they were very playful.”
Ruuam remembers the fisherman sticking straws into blowfish to inflate or deflate them, and dousing each other with buckets of smelly water that held fish in the summer.
She kept coming back for more, and, in the ’80s, she moved into an apartment and studio space within the fish market in a space that she shared with Meyer & Thompson Smoked Fish Company on Beekman Street.
“I would hang my art on fish boxes,” Ruaam said. “The fishmongers took me in.”
When the space was sold in 1997, Ruuam moved across the road to 1 Fulton Fish Market where the well-known Blue Ribbon Co. was housed.
But, in 2005, the fish market was moved to the Bronx and the seaport area has been deodorized of its pungent smell. Only small, nominal traces of the market still exist, such as a fading sign on an old Beekman Street brownstone that says “Fresh Salt.”
Ruaam herself now lives and works on the Lower East Side.
But her mind keeps coming back to the market, which viewers can see in her art.
“The great thing about being an artist is that you can stop time in its tracks,” she said. “You can keep living in the past.”
