By Gabriella Gershenson

Worksman Trading Corporation
94-15 100th St. (94th Ave.), Ozone Park, Queens, 800-BUY-CART.

Jack Beller, vice president of the Vending Division of Worksman Cycles in Queens, the country’s oldest manufacturer of food vending carts, has been known to trawl the city streets looking for dings and nicks in food carts.

"Unfortunately today there’s a lot of junk on the streets," laments Beller, whose father put him to work in this business at the age of 12. "There was a time when most vendors cared about equipment and the product that they put out, but that’s not true for the most part today. Equipment doesn’t look as nice and it’s not maintained nearly as well."

Beller calls the rusty, dented little carts that are ubiquitous tenants of the city’s sidewalks "down ’n’ dirty carts." They are, in his words, "slapped together, quick and cheap."

But according to Beller, Worksman has nothing to do with this method of production. Rather, the company upholds more than a century-long tradition and legacy of two historic companies: Worksman itself, and Admar, the company it acquired in 1996 that once belonged to Beller’s father.

In 1948, Ed Beller opened Admar, a restaurant equipment shop, in an area that is still considered a "restaurant equipment" district, on Catherine St. and Bowery. The space had previously been inhabited by manufacturers of wooden vending carts, which were still prevalent among street vendors at the time. "People would still come by and say ‘Do you have carts?’" the younger Beller recalls. "So he decided to make carts."

Admar’s hot dog carts started off as iron, evolved into stainless steel, and then into a permanent, and oft-copied fixture of the city landscape. As is still done at Worksman today, Beller’s father used industrial kitchen-caliber equipment to build his carts, which Beller says sets them apart from the skrimpers.

Admar bought wheels for its structures from the nearby Worksman Cycles, located on a block that was to become the site of the World Trade Center. Worksman Cycles began its run as a dry goods store before Morris Worksman, the Russian immigrant proprietor, started tinkering with bicycles and devised the three-wheel designs that would replace the horse and buggy among the city’s merchants.

Worksman’s model for the ice-cream-vending trike reached mythic status when it was picked up by Good Humor and became the de rigeur ice-cream-cycle. Since then, the iconography of Worksman has penetrated the collective American consciousness to such a degree that a Good Humor cart is on display in the Smithsonian Museum.

Though the Good Humor cart had extraordinary staying power and is still in use, the vending business has seen other trends come and go. Beller notes that in the 70s, the company altered the design of their carts to accommodate the growing numbers of kebab vendors. In a recent afternoon in his Ozone Park office, which is peppered with hot dog and ice cream cart memorabilia, Beller showed me a picture album with photos like the one of "Dr. Snowball" who sells "The World’s Best Snowballs"; Beller has also spoken of the city’s erstwhile juice carts and of some of his more bizarre exports, including a reindeer-meat hot dog cart for Alaskan customers.

With its various orders of business, which range from outfitting Mr. Softee-style trucks to building carts for Nathan’s, Hebrew National, Boar’s Head and delivery wagons for D’Agostino’s, to vending carts for foodstuffs such as churros, gyros, Italian ices and Italian sausage, Worksman’s vending division has probably contributed as much to the New York City ethos as any major city planner.