Inside the Final Days of New York City's Last Dairy

Elmhurst Dairy closes its doors in late October. What happens when a metropolis loses milk?



Elmhurst Dairy in Jamaica, Queens, closes this week. ARMAN ZHENIKEYEV/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

By Marguerite Holloway
OCTOBER 30, 2016

On a recent Friday between 2:00 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., Anthony Vasquez wound his truck through midtown Manhattan, making 40 stops to deliver milk for Bartlett Dairy. New York City is America’s largest, most complex dairy market. A bodega or deli might order a few quarts; Starbucks might need a truckload of gallons. The range in the scale of customers, the congestion, and the confounding parking regulations all contribute to the market’s eccentricities.

Delivering milk has always been hard work because time is critical and milk is heavy. In New York City it also requires strategic thinking. As Vasquez wheeled stacks of 50-pound crates on a handcart or lugged them up and down stairs, he fine-tuned his route for maximum efficiency and minimum parking tickets. (He only got one that morning, his first in a week.) And he reflected on an upheaval in the city’s dairy market that will affect the route he has been driving for 12 years: Elmhurst Dairy, New York City’s last milk processing facility, will be shutting down for good this weekend.

“It is going to have a big impact on our small business,” Vasquez said. “I think it is going to hurt a lot.”

Based in Jamaica, Queens, Elmhurst supported a unique network of distributors, like Bartlett, provided about 270 manufacturing jobs in a city where such jobs are scarce, and was the sole supplier of more than 110 million half-pints annually to public schools. Its closure, which seemed inevitable to some observers and has shocked others, is rippling out across the city and state. Such disruption is nothing new—New York City’s dairy industry has been undergoing disruption since it was born. Its peculiarities have shaped aspects of national dairy policy and its goings-on have sometimes been at odds with milk’s wholesome image: poison, death, violence, and Pete Seeger all appear in its two-century history.



Cows roaming in Winfield, Queens, in 1899. Today Winfield is part of Woodside. NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/PUBLIC DOMAIN

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