The City section did a piece on that old timey fruit and vegetable shop on Court Street in Boerum/Cobble Hill. I think there’s a connection between that shop and the fruit truck on President Street. I think they used to be in business together but they had a falling out. Maybe I made that up. But I don’t think so.

CARMINE CINCOTTA, 53, was in his usual position at the back of Jim
and Andy’s, a narrow slip of a produce store on Court Street along the
Boerum Hill-Cobble Hill fault line. A folded copy of a newspaper rested
on a box of kiwis in front of him, open to the crossword.

"Fielding novel?" he grunted,
eyes peering over the tops of his black spectacles like a college
professor. "Anyone know any Fielding?" The question was addressed to
the store’s handful of customers.

"Tom Jones?" suggested the man next to him.

Mr. Cincotta turned and gazed at him with infinite weariness. "That’s the only one you know, isn’t it?" he said.

The
customer laughed; an old friend of Carmine’s, he knew and appreciated
these rules of engagement. At the far end of the store, magnificently
detached from his son’s daily performance, stood Mr. Cincotta’s father,
Jimmy, 80, gazing serenely out of the window at the passing parade, as
though the two of them inhabited different stores entirely. Short and
round, the older Mr. Cincotta is the physical opposite of his tall,
lean son, as though they were related not by blood but by their years
together on this small stage.

Since 1970, when Jimmy Cincotta
moved permanently into the place on Court Street that he and a partner
had been renting as a storage area, Jim and Andy’s has been a fixture
on Court Street. Through subsequent decades, bars have become bodegas,
which in turn have become restaurants and real estate offices. But the
store, with its brown sign and simple facade of fruit and vegetables
piled on crates — no Dean & DeLuca styling here — has remained a
constant. The interior consists of cracked black-and-white linoleum
tiling, peeling walls and, if you venture far enough back, a glimpse of
a tiny "office" piled with papers, into which Carmine Cincotta is apt
to retreat when business is slow or he feels the need for a little
privacy.

The older Mr. Cincotta has been in the fruit and
vegetable business since he was 13, back in 1939. He began by helping
his father, whom he unashamedly calls a "peddler," using a horse and
cart to travel around the neighborhood.

"On Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays I’d work that side of Court Street," he said,
indicating what is now called Boerum Hill, "and on Tuesdays, Thursdays
and Saturdays I’d work this side" — he stabbed in the direction of
Cobble Hill. Neither nomenclature existed back then; both areas were
still part of the vast sweep of "South Brooklyn."

It was hard
work. He would be up at 3 or 4 in the morning to head to the old
produce market on West Street in Manhattan, then catch a few hours’
sleep before hitting the streets until 6 or 7 p.m. He would remain
outside in all weather, unless the temperature dropped below 30
degrees, when he would take the horse back to the stables. If it was
hot, there was no respite.

"I remember my favorite horse,
Dolly," he said. "She was strong, unbelievable. You get some days in
July or August and that tar is really soft, and she was pulling twice
her weight. The wheels would go right in."

By 1970, when Mr.
Cincotta gave up his last horse, the network of stables and blacksmiths
and feed merchants required to sustain them was disappearing. "That’s
when everybody started getting really fussy," he said. Residents began
objecting to the smell of horse manure, the last stables were being
gobbled up for parking lots or residential developments, and finding a
blacksmith became almost impossible.

"I remember when we used
to put four shoes on a horse for $6," he recalled. "The last horse was
$50, and the guy had to come in from out of town."

Mr. Cincotta
had not planned for any of his children to enter the business; he
worked so hard in large part to put Carmine and his brother, Philip,
and sister, Nancy, through college so they might go on to better
things.

Carmine Cincotta had no plans to join his father
either, though he also had no plans of any other description. "I was
totally clueless," he said. "I’m the only person who got a history
degree from Baruch when it was almost 100 percent a business college…