After the Pike Place Market opened in 1907, fish sellers joined vegetable farmers, fruit growers, flower vendors, butchers, bakers, and other merchants to create a beloved central marketplace for Seattle shoppers. By the 1920s there were nearly a dozen fish stalls in the Market, many of them owned by recent immigrants from Turkey and the island of Rhodes. Over many decades, these men (and a handful of women) became living symbols of the city's most visited tourist destination. In 1979, newspaper columnist Emmett Watson identified Jack Levy, Sol Amon, and John Yokoyama as "the Big Three fish merchants of the Market" ("Week's Ender"), though many others created lasting legacies. Today there are four fish shops in the Market, including the renowned Pike Place Fish Market – the place where they throw the fish.
"Everybody Buy!"
The fish business in Seattle began with a famous trade. A few days after the Denny Party landed at Alki Point on November 13, 1851, Charles Terry opened a general store in a hastily built cabin near the beach. One of his first customers, Luther Collins, "bought six pans, one large and two small tin pails, six pint basins, a coffee pot, two frying pans, two candlesticks, and one dipper. It appears that Collins paid for these goods with 12 salmon" (Warren, 88).
The fish trade grew quickly from there. By the turn of the century, several fish retailers and wholesale houses had set up along the Seattle waterfront. Then, after the Pike Place Market opened to overflow crowds in 1907, fish sellers hurried up the hill to rent stalls in the Market. By the 1920s there were close to a dozen Market fish shops manned by a colorful cast of characters, many of whom were recent immigrants looking for a better life in America. Businesses would pass down through generations, so that today the most famous fishmongers are as much an enduring part of the Market as the big clock facing Pike Street. The Levy family – David; his sons Albert, Jack, and Gary; and their sons Bruce and David – sold fish from the same Market stall for 72 years. The Amons – Jack; his sons Sol and Irving; and now Sol's grandchildren – have been Market vendors off and on since 1911. John Yokoyama started working in the Market at his parents' produce stand before buying the adjacent fish market and running it for 53 years. If there were a Pike Place Market fishmongers Hall of Fame, it surely would also include George Bates, Albert Ovadia, Harry Calvo, Cookie Cohen, John Peterson, Dick Yokoyama, Jaison Scott, Jack Mathers, Flip Sturdivant, Richard Hoage, Samuel Samson, Mike Osborn, and Leon Franco.
In 1962, when the Century 21 World's Fair lit up the city, Seattle Times columnist John Reddin informed out-of-towners that a visit to the Market might be just as entertaining as the Bubbleator or the Space Needle:
"Always a good show, the uninhibited and comfortable 55-year-old market seems to take on added color and excitement during the tourist season. The produce and fish vendors, always a carefree and noisy lot, joke and argue with the customers with more gusto, and their intramural banter and name-calling in assorted dialects and foreign accents seems a little more enthusiastic when they are playing before an out-of-town audience ... Selling fish at the Pike Place Market is as much a show and an art as the display of the fish. The cries of 'Fresh fish, EVERYBODY buy!' resound through the arcades until the cadence is firmly caught in the mind like a catchy commercial. Crowds gather as a tourist stocks up on crabs. The fishmongers chant 'one and TWO and THREE' as the front man slings the crabs over the counter. The show is on, and the cameras come out …" ("Tourists Like Colorful ...").
In the 1980 book The Market Notebook, the authors write that there is much more to the fish sellers than flash and showmanship. Then and now, the fishmongers – traditionally men, though a few women have joined the ranks in recent years – are conversant on all aspects of seafood:
"The fishmongers know their fish … They are expert at filleting a paper-thin petrale sole – with no waste (and at no cost). They will clean a crab, gut a salmon, even dismantle a geoduck. And they are quick with advice – how much fish to buy for a party of six, the best way to fillet a king salmon for baking – and with recipes. They know the best way to cook skate wing and will happily share the family recipe for baked lingcod with tomatoes, parsley and garlic – lots of garlic" (The Market Notebook, 79).
Today [2024] there are four fish stalls in the Market. City Fish is at the north end, just above the ramp to the lower level. Pure Food Fish is in the center of the main arcade, next door to the Athenian. Jack's Fish Spot is across the way in the Sanitary Market Building, just across the aisle from Three Girls Bakery. Under the clock and just past Rachel the Pig is the Pike Place Fish Market, "a place where fishmongers will catch your fish right before your eyes – and if you’re lucky they won’t drop it on the floor" ("Where Fish Fly ...").
Throw and Tell
Visitors flock to Pike Place Fish Market to watch fish fly, though fish tossing began long before the busy stand became a tourist attraction. The ritual began for practical reasons at various Market stalls as a way to expedite sales by moving fish quickly from the front of the store to a clerk behind the counter.
John Yokoyama, longtime proprietor of Pike Place Fish Market, claimed that the practice began "when he started counting the number of steps it took for him to pick up a customer’s selection, walk around to the backdoor, hustle over to the scales where the merchandise is weighed, cut and packaged, and then walk back around to the front with the wrapped package. 'It took me 100 steps,' said Yokoyama. 'So one day I just said, "Here kid, catch!" and threw the fish. He caught it and I said, 'Man, I just saved 100 steps'" ("It’s Surreal …"). But fish throwing predates Yokoyama's ownership of Pike Place Fish Market, which began in 1965. As far back as 1938, Albert Ovadia, co-owner of the Philadelphia Fish Market, was tossing fish. "If the customer desires, Ovadia will pick up a fish and hurl it into the arms of a customer," reported The Seattle Times. "Ovadia throws with a wide, sweeping side-arm delivery and he is said to have an unusual amount of downspin on the fish" ("Strolling Around Town").
The clerks at Pure Food Fish were tossing fish in the early 1960s, maybe earlier. The Times reported that proprietor Sol Amon had stopped throwing fish by 1968 "when he decided that maintaining the quality of his product outweighed the kitsch value of a soaring salmon. "'That stuff is expensive,' he said. 'You wouldn’t throw a $20 bill around like a football'" ("Employ Yourself?"). But in fact, "Captain Cod" was still throwing fish in 1979, when the Times ran a photo of a grinning Amon preparing to catch a flying salmon and wrote, "The air-mail delivery from an employee in front of the counter helps speed the weighing and wrapping of the fish for the customer" ("If It’s Flying Fish …"). Even crustaceans went airborne. In 1980, the Times again visited Pure Food Fish: "Tourists jockey with each other for space to flash their cameras at the crabs, the geoducks, the salmon … Over it all comes the cry of the fish merchants. Crabs fly through the air. 'Three crabs for Honolulu,' comes the cry, and it’s understood that they’ll soon be nestled in their carrying case and jetliner-bound" ("The Market Harvest …").
The fishmongers at Pike Place Fish Market simply took fish tossing to another level. By 2003, they were throwing 200 to 300 fish on busy days. "Salmon gets tossed the most because that's what we sell the most," said store manager Dick Yokoyama, John's brother, though crab, rainbow trout, and halibut were also seen in flight. "Whatever we sell out there on the beds has gotta be thrown because it's not gonna walk around by itself" ("Shopping at the Market ...").
Tourists couldn't resist watching fish fly, so the hands at Pike Place Fish Market kept throwing them, occasionally to their detriment. John Peterson, for 25 years a fishmonger, retired in 1998 at the age of 48, worn down by 60-hour work weeks. "That, and the fact that three years ago he blew a disc in his lower back after throwing one too many fish. When he couldn't pitch fish, he was shifted over to stand in front of the crabs. He still tosses a trout or two on occasion" ("Goodbye, Fish Guy"). Peterson, whose signature throw was the underhand fish-pitch, became a legendary figure in the Market, known by many as "Fish Guy." His retirement was noted in The Seattle Times:
"Amid the mounds of manila clams and rows of neatly stacked sockeye salmon, he is a daily special in his own right – a burly man with tufts of curly white hair who flits around the edges of the Pike Place Fish Market, waiting to send a salmon or bag of mussels airborne. For the past 25 years, John Peterson's trademark fish-toss has become a living symbol of the Pike Place Market, earning him spots on television commercials and films, and in newspaper and magazine articles. After pitching an estimated 500,000 fish for customers who have included novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., former baseball star George Brett, actress Lauren Bacall and 'Late Show' host David Letterman, Peterson will launch his last fish today as he retires from a job that wore him down but left him proud" ("Goodbye, Fish Guy").
Anders Miller, one of four employees who bought Pike Place Fish Market from Yokoyama in 2018, said tossing fish is an essential part of the job. "When you have 300 people, four cruise ships, these people want to see a show. The crowd wants to see fish fly," Miller said. But as Seattle Times reporter Eric Lacitis pointed out, throwing fish for show can damage the fish. "So, we buy lower-grade chum salmon and throw them until they get soft," Miller said. "Then we freeze them and donated them to Wolf Haven," a wolf sanctuary in Thurston County ("The Surprising Stories …"). No matter the grade of the fish, there's a correct way to toss them. "The fish is heavy toward the head and lighter toward the tail, and it wants to flip over," said Pike Place Fish Market co-owner Ryan Reese. "The secret is to cradle it like a baby and throw it without letting it spiral or spin" ("Keeping the Fish Flying").
City Fish: The Original
City Fish wasn't the first fish shop in the Market, but it soon became the busiest. Its beginnings trace to 1918, when the city of Seattle went into the fish business as a way to combat skyrocketing seafood prices during World War I. Leasing a stall at 1535 Pike Place, the city opened the Municipal Fish Market on January 25, 1918, and, subsidizing prices with fish obtained from State Fish Commission hatcheries, sold more than 1,300 pounds of salmon the first day. In 1923, no longer seeing a need to sell fish, the city transferred its lease to Nessim Alhadeff (1884-1950), operator of the Palace Fish & Oyster Company on the Seattle waterfront. Alhadeff renamed the store City Fish, hired David Levy (d. 1943) to run it, and reopened on June 16, 1923.
Alhadeff and Levy were Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s. Levy had been a tailor on the Turkish island of Marmara but struggled to make ends meet as a tailor in Seattle. By the mid-1910s he co-owned a fish market on the waterfront before selling it to Alhadeff, and then went bankrupt operating a downtown haberdashery. By the 1920s he was back working for Alhadeff, but in 1923 he was stricken with yellow jaundice and nearly died. "They were from the old country, and they worked everybody really hard," said Jack Levy. "They got him out of there because they knew he couldn't take it there in the back room. So they gave him the City Fish Market to run" (Jack Levy interview). Alhadeff sold the business to David Levy in 1926, spawning the Levy family dynasty at City Fish.
In the meantime, competing fish markets popped up all around:
"During the 1920s and '30s there were eleven fish markets within the Pike Place Market. They were small – People’s Fish shared with Hastings Grocery and Angels Butter and Eggs a space on the main arcade that today is occupied by only one high stall – and the others were as compact, tucked into every level and area of the old Market. The names of the businesses were resolutely New World – Philadelphia Fish, American Fish, State Fish Market, Olympia Fish and Oyster Company – while the names of the fishmongers were a roll call of the Sephardic families who had come to Seattle from the Mediterranean area in the early years of the century. Calderon, Bensussen, Ovadia, Cohen, Amon, Levy – lots of Levys. There was Dave 'Good Weight' Levy and Isaac 'Red' Levy. In fact, there were at one time five Isaac Levys in the Market, and on one memorable day they were all working at the fish market in stall 9. A present-day Levy remembers the occasion well. 'We’d go by all day and yell, "Hey, Isaac," and watch five heads turn'" (The Market Notebook, 78).
Jack Levy (1914-2002) first worked for his father at the age of 12, selling shopping bags and sorting newspapers for fish-wrap. He tried other things as an adult, including a failed attempt to run a restaurant on Pike Street, but always came back to the Market. When his father died in 1943 and his older brother Albert left for a job in San Francisco, Jack and his younger brother Gary became the proprietors of City Fish in 1947. They would run the store together for the next 39 years.
As with the other fishmongers in the Market, the job demanded long hours and heavy lifting. "Six days a week one brother comes down and opens up about 8:30 a.m.," wrote The Seattle Times in 1975. "The other brother takes the pickup and makes the rounds of wholesale fish houses to pick up the stuff they hope to sell that day ... When the truck is unloaded they start dressing and preparing the fish for display in the market" ("A Market Fish Family"). Their selection was vast, Jack Levy recalled: "You ask me, in my prime days in the City Fish Market, if I had any cod … I had ling cod, black cod, rock cod, true cod, salt cod … how do you want your salt cod packaged, in cellophane, or do you want it in a box? I also had salted black cod, I had kippered black cod … I’d go on and on, and we had it all on hand" (Sadis).
Jack was the more personable of the brothers and served as the front man. "He was the heart and soul of the shop, recalled his brother, easily bantering with customers about the finer points of fish and cooking" ("Jack Levy: Passionate About Fish ..."). Gary was renowned for never forgetting a face, though he was less proficient with names. Both were deft salesmen. With a Times reporter looking on in 1962, Jack Levy showed off a 10-pound salmon to a passerby. "I can sell you a bigger fish," he told the shopper. "I can sell you a fish that costs more. I got them. But I can’t sell you a better fish than this one right here" (Spears). And thus another sale was consummated.
Jack Levy sold his share of the business to Gary in 1986 and retired. Gary stayed on until 1995, when he sold to Jon Daniels, who entered the retail trade "after years as a commercial fisherman chasing herring from Ketchikan to Nome and salmon through Bristol Bay and Kodiak" ("Where Fish Fly ..."). Daniels, who ran City Fish for 16 years, said Jack Levy would often drop by to see how things were going. "He always cared," said Daniels. "He still had that competitive edge" ("Jack Levy: Passionate About Fish ...").
Pure Food Fish: Solly's Place
Located midway down the arcade, Pure Food Fish has been a Market staple for decades. A sign in the shop says the business was established in 1911, though Jack Amon (1893-1966) and his son Sol (1929-2021) didn't acquire the business until 1956. Like David Levy, Jack Amon had immigrated from Turkey and soon found his way into fish. "My father started in the Market in 1911," Sol Amon said, "and from then on he worked at various fish markets, managed them, and ran them, and owned them ... In the early days it was a lot of hard work in the Market. They brought their fish up from the waterfront, they brought their ice up from the waterfront, and it was a very difficult job" (Sadis). Jack Amon left the Market in the 1930s to work for Palace Fish. He returned in 1946 and Sol joined him in 1947. By the time he was 21, Sol was fully immersed in fish. "I had some great tutoring and mentors when I was a young kid," he recalled. "I was able to go out and buy schooners or boats of halibut, 30,000, 40,000 pounds of halibut, and sell it. And I was only 21 years old, and my dad never stopped me, 'Do what you want to do'" (Amon interview).
All but forgotten today is that Jack Amon founded the rival Pike Place Fish Market in 1930 with partner Gus Constantine. Amon sold his interest to Constantine after a few years, then owned his own Market fish stall from 1946 until 1956, when he and Sol acquired Pure Food Fish. "In 1954, my dad had a heart attack," Sol Amon recalled. "The area where he was working was very cold, so he wanted to leave the Market, but there was a place for sale in the middle of the Market. It was Pure Food Fish Market ... So we took over, we took their lease, and I became partners with my dad" (Amon interview). The business was a family affair – run by Jack and his sons Sol and Irving – until soaring sales required outside help. Today Pure Food Fish boasts about 15 employees, a long list of loyal customers, and a thriving mail-order business.
Irving Amon worked at Pure Food Fish for 55 years, though Sol was the main attraction for more than 60 years, presiding over the store "with the patient, practiced skill of a ringmaster conducting an unruly circus. Through the years he has compiled a veritable mental encyclopedia of fish facts" ("The Market Harvest ..."). Seattle architect Victor Steinbrueck, at the forefront of efforts to save the Market in 1971, wrote in 1968 that the Amon brothers "contribute their share of flavor to the market, both with their colorful personalities and with their attractive displays of fresh seafoods … Sol Amon, the tall one, has a spiel for passers-by as well as customers, including his appreciative 'Hubba-hubba' when an interesting girl walks by” (Market Sketchbook).
Perhaps more than any other merchant, Solly Amon was a Market lifer. "Somebody said I started in the Market when I was 3 years old," he recalled in 1990. "My father had a fish stall at the south end of the Market then. One day he brought me to work, put an apron on me and sat me down on an empty crate" ("Tale of One …"). Amon was 91 years old when he finally retired in 2020. In 2006 he became the longest-tenured active vendor in the Market, and the Seattle City Council proclaimed April 11, 2006, to be Sol Amon Day. After he died in 2021, his wife, Tillie, said, "Solly did everything. It was really his place... but he loved it. He really did ... It was his first love. I was second" ("Remembering the Codfather ...").
Jack's Fish Spot: Fresh and Flavorful
Across Pike Place in the Sanitary Market Building is Jack's Fish Spot, a seafood market and also a casual lunch counter best known for its cioppino, fish and chips, oysters, and fresh steamed Dungeness crabs pulled straight from the tanks out front. Jack Mathers (b. 1951), a former commercial fisherman, opened the shop in 1982, about three years after his sister Gretchen Mathers opened her own restaurant, Gretchen’s of Course, just around the corner on Stewart Street. The Mathers siblings were raised on Capitol Hill in a "foodie" family; their mother Helen worked at Victor Rosellini’s 610, and Gretchen (1941-2007) later became the first woman president of the Washington Restaurant Association. Jack had been running the Fish Spot from a storefront at 27th and E Madison in Madison Park before moving to the Market.
Serving fresh seafood differentiates Jack’s Fish Spot from the Market’s other fish stalls, as does the location on the east side of Pike Place, where it has steadfastly avoided becoming a tourist trap. "Not many people take snapshots at Jack’s," wrote the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1998, "but lucky tourists and savvy locals know it as the place to stop for a quick hit of sea fare year 'round" ("Cheap Eats"). Mathers, who writes his own blues-inspired rock and roll music, added a splash of personality to the menu, and it didn’t hurt that he exuded sex appeal to a certain clientele. When Seattle Times food columnist Nancy Leson wrote about her early experiences in Seattle, she detailed trips to the Market with her friend and tour guide:
"She’d take me to Bill Frank’s Place Pigalle, home to the most romantic bar in town, where we’d sip cocktails, eat steamed mussels and wonder if we’d ever find true love. Long before we found it, we’d ogle over our favorite fishmonger, big-blue-eyed Jack Mathers at Jack’s Fish Spot, where we’d stop for cioppino or fish 'n' chips" ("Market Memories").
Mathers ran Jack’s Fish Spot for nearly 40 years, always with an eye toward affordability. In 2005, when the retail price of Copper River salmon soared to $24.99 a pound, Mathers explained to the Post-Intelligencer that Copper River was "overmarketed" and "overhyped." "It’s the same (fish)," he said. "It just goes up a longer river and so it stores more oil ... it's mainly the first fish of the year ... I mean it's a little bit better, but it isn't all that much better for what they're getting for it. So they're basically ruining the fish business by making it be a designer fish, where it's supposed to be fun to eat every day, and they're making it like it's an occasion. Well, it isn't that much of an occasion. They better get back to it being an everyday meal so people can afford it" ("Coppers Worth ...").
In 2018, Mathers turned over management of Jack's to his daughter Murphie, and today two of the four Market fish stalls are being run by women. Over at Pure Food Fish, Carlee Hollenbeck, Solly Amon's granddaughter, has been in charge since 2013.
Pike Place Fish Market: World Famous by Design
Pike Place Fish Market was struggling in 1965 when John Yokoyama bought it from Bill Constantine, son of co-founder Gus Constantine, for $3,500. Yokoyama had been an employee there since the early 1960s, when he moved over from his parent's neighboring produce stand; he figured he'd have an easier time making payments on his new 1965 Buick Riviera if he owned the place. But the shop's fortunes continued to wane for the next 20 years, until Yokoyama met with a business consultant, brainstormed with his employees, and, in 1986, hit on the idea that Pike Place Fish Market should embody the slogan "world famous." Getting to that point would require a sea change in the way the store did business, starting at the top with Yokoyama himself. "I was a grumpy, stupid young buck," he recalled. "I had to transition myself from a yelling, screaming dictator tyrant who my employees didn't like very much into someone who cares about people and is committed to being in a loving partnership with my employees, our customers and the world" ("Keeping the Fish Flying").
In addition to Yokoyama and his brother Dick, Pike Place Fish Market's crew included Carlos Hanoh, "the hashish-loving Greek fishmonger" (Large) and a talented linguist who served customers of many nationalities, "often conversing with them in their native tongue – French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Greek, Polish, German, Japanese, or English" (Market Sketchbook). Yokoyama hired the "Fish Guy," John Peterson, in 1975. Samuel Samson came aboard in 1986 and was still throwing fish 38 years later. Jaison Scott, hired in 1993, had been a familiar face in the Market since he was a toddler, when his mother, a fishmonger herself, brought him to work and propped him up on a banana box.
By the 1990s, Pike Place Fish Market was riding high as a popular store for locals and a happy place for tourists. "The show includes shouting orders like 'Wrap it up!' and 'Filet it!' that are echoed by a chorus of baritone voices of several co-workers," wrote The Seattle Times in 1998. "Peterson casts witty remarks and catchy phrases to flocks of tourists, who eat it up like so much popcorn shrimp. He plays peek-a-boo with kids and throws out high-fives, bounding from one spot to the next to help potential customers" ("Goodbye, Fish Guy"). One day a group of women passers-by purchased $200 worth of halibut. "They had stopped by the stand and were so charmed by the fish-throwing men in orange overalls that they bought 18 pounds of halibut without a clue about how to cook it." Another time, "Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose slipped and hit his head after tossing a fish. The 'Axl' sticker on the cash register still marks the spot" ("A Depp Day at Salish ...").
Against the odds, Yokoyama and his team succeeded in their quest to become world famous. By 2000, Yokoyama and business consultant Jim Bergquist had produced a best-selling corporate training video. Pike Place Fish Market had been featured in a Levi's TV commercial directed by Spike Lee, served as a backdrop for the TV show Frasier and the movie Free Willy, and become "the requisite tourist stop on everyone's Seattle itinerary ... Like a flying fish, Yokoyama is riding high. He's been bombarded with invitations to give corporate presentations. Some 3,000 organizations – including Nordstrom, Boeing, Amazon.com, Nokia, Harley-Davidson, Sprint, Saturn, Southwest Airlines and McDonalds – are already using the video 'Fish' and its sequel, 'Fish Sticks'" ("Fish Throwers' Video ...").
In 2018, approaching his 79th birthday, Yokoyama sold the business to Jaison Scott, Ryan Reese, Sam Samson, and Anders Miller and retired. "He wants to do the things he never had a chance to do while working the 12-hour shifts required by his business," reported the Times. "His list includes traveling, golfing, and yes, fishing" ("Keeping the Fish Flying").
