Tony Kushner on The Pushcart War
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Concept
e-bike revolution
An e-bike is a bike that has a small motor to help you pedal, making it easier to ride. The e-bike revolution means lots of people are starting to use these bikes instead of cars or buses.
Concept
certified refurbished e-bikes
Certified refurbished e-bikes are used electric bikes that experts have checked and fixed up to make sure they work well before selling them again. They usually come with a guarantee.
Concept
Pushcart War
The Pushcart War is a story about small street vendors who use pushcarts to sell goods and how they stand up to big trucks that take over the city streets. It shows how ordinary people can fight against powerful forces.
Concept
push cart peddlers
Push cart peddlers are people who sell things from small carts they push around on the street. They were common in cities and helped many people make a living by selling food or other items.
Term
trucks
Trucks are big vehicles used to carry things from one place to another. In cities, trucks can be seen as strong machines that sometimes push out smaller sellers who use carts.
Concept
bully
A bully is someone who is mean to others and tries to scare or hurt them. This talk is about how bullies act in public places and how people can stand up to them.
Term
truck driver
A truck driver is someone who drives big trucks to move things from one place to another. Here, the truck driver is pushing someone, showing how big vehicles can be used to intimidate.
Concept
large object theory of history
This idea means that if you are really big or strong, you can push through anything or anyone in your way. It’s like being so big that people have to move aside or get hurt.
Term
domestic terrorism
Domestic terrorism means people doing harmful or violent things inside their own country to scare others or make a point. Sometimes this can involve damaging cars or trucks on purpose.
Term
truck tires
Truck tires are big, strong tires made to carry heavy trucks and their loads. They are tougher than regular car tires.
Concept
bike lane
A bike lane is a special part of the road just for bikes, so they can ride safely without cars in the way.
Concept
parking
Parking means places where cars can be left when people are not driving them. Sometimes cities change parking spots into other things like places to sit.
Car
Ford Ranger
The Ford Ranger is a medium-sized truck made by Ford. It's used for carrying things and driving in different kinds of weather and roads. People like it because it is strong but not too big.
Concept
open streets
Open streets means closing some roads to cars for a while so people can walk, bike, and enjoy the space safely without cars.
Concept
congestion pricing
Congestion pricing means you pay money to drive in busy city areas during busy times. This helps reduce traffic jams and makes the city less crowded.
Car
Chrysler New Yorker
The Chrysler New Yorker is a big, comfortable car made by Chrysler. It was designed to be fancy and smooth to drive, often liked by people living in cities like New York.
Concept
pushcart vendor
A pushcart vendor is someone who sells things like food or snacks from a small cart they push around on the street.
Term
public transportation
Public transportation means buses, trains, or other vehicles that anyone can use to get around the city instead of driving their own car.
Term
subway
A subway is like a train that runs underground in a city to help people get around fast without using cars. Many big cities have subways to make travel easier.
Car
Chevrolet Suburban
The Chevrolet Suburban is a very big SUV made by Chevrolet. It can carry many people and lots of stuff, making it good for families and long trips. It is often used in neighborhoods outside big cities.
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Okay, this month marks an interesting anniversary of sorts of an event that has not yet taken place
except in a classic work of fiction, that is, because it is on March 15th, 2026, that the
events described in the charming and provocative children's novel The Pushkart War are said to
have begun. The Pushkart War, written by Gene Merrill and illustrated by Ronny Salbert and first
published in 1964, tells the story of a band of Pushkart vendors who fight against the organized
forces of big trucks on the streets of New York City. It's told in the form of a journalistic
and historical report filed 10 years after the legendary battle. When the book was written,
the events described in it were said to have taken place in 1976. But every decade or so,
the Pushkart War is updated and the most recent edition from New York Review Books sets the date
of the legendary battle as happening the very week this episode drops. So we thought now would be a
perfect time to look at what the book tells us about the streets of our cities and the fight
for social justice. What happens when a band of ordinary citizens stands up against those with
power, money, and influence? To help us out, we have a truly special guest. Tony Kushner is perhaps
best known for his monumental 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, which
illuminates the dark complexity of the American soul through the lens of the AIDS crisis and the
gay experience of the 1980s. He's also collaborated with Steven Spielberg on several film projects,
including Lincoln and West Side Story. His 2004 musical, Caroline or Change, was nominated for
six Tony Awards. Those are just a few of the high points of his multifaceted career. Tony
Kushner, welcome to the war on cars. Thanks for having me. We're so excited to have you here before
we started recording. The audience cannot see this, but I had held up my copies from college of
parts one and two of Angels in America. So it's a real thrill, which I've held on to all these years.
So let's do a little table setting. Let's summarize a few key plot points for people who
haven't read the book or who haven't read it in a long time, maybe since they were kids.
We thought it would be great to just talk about the New York Times review from 1964 might be the
best way to get through the plot. It says, the year was 1976, New York City had become so crowded
that one day all traffic on the streets stopped completely. Most people blamed the trucks,
which had grown too large and arrogant. The three owners of the largest trucking companies in the
city knew they must find a scapegoat and push carts seemed an easy target. So the push cart war
begins when a vendor named Morris the florist has his push cart full of daffodils destroyed by a
trucker named Mack who wants to take his space at the curb. This spurs the city's push cart vendors
to start an anti truck campaign. They meet organize and start stealthily using pea shooters to shoot
peas with pins in them at truck tires, thereby flattening them and disabling the trucks.
The battles escalate into a full fledged war, although thankfully nobody dies. The push carts
we come to understand are on the side of humanity, kindness and beauty. The trucks represent greed,
corruption and mechanized indifference. Tony, I know this book is important to you.
Very important.
Can you tell us about when you first read the book and what it meant to you?
I think I must have read it when it was first published in 1964. I didn't realize until
I agreed to do this podcast that people were routinely updating the start of the push cart war
from its original and I have some issues with that. I have to say I think it's a mistake.
When I tried to adapt it for film for Jonathan Demmey's film company in the 1990s, that was one
of the difficulties that I ran into is that it really describes in New York, I was in Louisiana
when I read the book, where I grew up, but I had family in New York and we visited New York
and it felt familiar to me back then as the city that I had sort of walked through as a tourist.
It's not the New York that exists today, so you know Ronnie Solbert's magnificent drawings,
I mean it describes a very different time, in many ways a different sort of population,
but when I was a little boy and I think my Aunt Lucy and Uncle Dick sent me the book
right when it came out, I read it and I absolutely adored it. I mean for one thing,
it's a children's book that doesn't really have any children in it. It's all adults and it sort of
starts out in this kind of Melvillian fashion with Professor Lyman Cumberley who has assembled
these documents, this sort of documentary history of this war that happened 10 years earlier
that changed the nature of New York City. So you're reading a history and it's very very funny
and very witty. It's really exciting to read a book written for kids where all the people in it are
adults, although they feel the push cart peddlers especially are very approachable as sort of the
kind of adults that kids would not feel alarmed by and you know I think Jean Merrill has said in
several places that she sort of realized that trucks were like the machine equivalent of
schoolyard bullies. As a little gay kid who was having a tough time on various playgrounds
in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I loved the sort of underdog side of it and you know I grew up
in a house, my mother was pretty left and my father was very liberal and my community, the Jewish
community in Lake Charles was for the most part you know good Democrats and good liberal people
and it was you know the beginnings of the civil rights movement, it was not the beginnings of
as the March on Washington it just happened and so on. So there was a lot stirring in the south
and I didn't know at that moment that I was identifying with the left but I sort of was I
think. We were told stories about the Selma march and the Freedom Riders and so on. So the push cart
just fit right in. It's a very subversive progressive fundamentally anti-capitalist
book. The people rising up with very little means at their disposal and handmade weapons
and it's a David and Goliath story and they plot against the giant and they bring the giant
down and change the city for the better. I love that and I think Jean Merrill had read an interview
that I gave at some point where I said that I thought the book had had a shaping influence
on my politics and she was very excited about that. When I contacted her and asked her if I
could try doing an adaptation she was very happy. Is that a completely dead project? Is there any
chance that might be resurrected? I think it's a dead project. The problem I ran to immediately
was what I started out my remarks with. I mean you know for instance there are no people of color
that I can remember in the push cart in the drawings of the push cart where they're all old
it's very Yiddish kite. The peddlers are mostly Jewish. There might be one or two Latino characters
I don't know. Maybe General Anna who is. There's one male Latino character I remember who speaks
in Spanish every now and then. Yes Mr. Sanchez I don't know anyway but yes and General Anna has
this kind of mentee or some sort of like she wears a kind of a shawl over her head so she doesn't
resemble. She looks a little bit like an elderly you know like Martha or Mary or something but
it didn't feel when I started working on in the 90s Rudolph Giuliani was the mayor of New York
and he had just done away with the squeegee men and you know this kind of proto or version of
MAGA was starting up the xenophobic and picking on the most vulnerable people in society and
brutalizing them and so I think I put the squeegee men into the push cart war and I changed
Mayor Cud, Emmett Cud who's the mayor of New York in the book. I changed him to a Rudolph
Giuliani. This is my favorite part of the script that I worked on. I made him a Italian American
mayor named Lupo de Gubio who is if you know St. Francis of Assisi. Lupo de Gubio is the wolf
of Gubio. It's this wild wolf who's eating children in the streets of Gubio and Assisi
and Francis runs into the wolf and converts him to Christianity and teaches him the air of his
ways. So I made the mayor into I think there was even a backstory that he had actually been a wolf
and he'd sort of slowly turned into a human being but not completely he was still basically a wolf.
Anyway all that stuff it got very big and shaggy and I finished the screenplay and I don't remember
half of what's in it. I just I was told that I needed to make children protagonists for it
but there's a gang of kids and all that stuff and I'm sure I'd dive embarrassment if I read it.
It didn't Jonathan Demme was very nice about it but he didn't want to make it
and I think Jean and Ronnie were very upset about that and I had taken as I usually do a very long
time to write it and I think they felt a little betrayed. They sort of thought that I was going
to get it made. I didn't realize at the time that there had been several other attempts to make it
into a film. It resisted adaptation because so much of what works in the book is
the tone of the writing, the illustrations and the idea that you're reading a documentary history.
I mean it's meant to be a book but it hurt. I'm sad about the fact that Jean and Ronnie felt
that I let them down and we never really reconciled that so that's a little dagger in the heart.
I'm sorry about that but you know I mean it's interesting because as you're talking about
just how specific the writing and the illustrations are to that era of New York
and that's very true. The themes are so evergreen and your work I mean makes so much sense to me
that this is a seminal text for you because your work is about a lot of it is about bullies
and how to resist bullies and abusers in the public realm and the character of Roy Cohn
who appears in Angels in America, Roy Cohn, Donald Trump's mentor is a good example of that and
I mean maybe you could talk about the persistence of those themes in your work and how they're
why this book is such a great example of them because now we're living under a regime of abusers
with institutionalized abuse and this book just seems more and more relevant to me all the time.
Yeah I mean I think about it ever since the arrival of Trump. Professor Lyman Cumberley
who's the historian who's assembled the book ostensibly. He's the character in the book
sort of put together this history. He's figured out in great detail that General Anna is a bad
aim with her with her p-shooter so she puts in the piece by hand and that Frankie Flowers is the
was that was the inciting incident with the no the daffodil guys. Morris the Morris the
florist gets aggressively pushed by the truck driver yes and that Professor Cumberley has a
theory of history called the large object it's all capitalized the large object theory of history
which is basically what you need to do to survive in the world is to be so big that
if anybody gets in your way just run them over and the large object theory of history really
describes Donald Trump's entire life and career is that he's an enormous bully and someone who
cannot take no for an answer and must have whatever he feels he must have and is utterly
incapable of empathy and blind to beauty and is just basically a gigantic appetite
an id fragment on legs and his whole career has been to increase his power so that
he doesn't get stopped by the various obstacles that he's been stopped by before and he just gets
so just as the the three the big truck owners um it was it it's tiger trucking and mammoth
trucks and lima the lower east side moving association and they're basically like mafia
guys but then or they're the trump family i mean it's this it's this crime syndicate and uh and
the large object theory of history is that all human misery is the product not of some sort of
general malevolence equally distributed among the human population but located among certain
people who feel that they have to basically get into a gigantic truck and run over push cart
peddlers in order to be safe and secure and and in in this world and and uh so i think about the
large object theory of history all the time sort of unrelated to the push cart war although he
was a big fan of the push cart war i became in the 90s at the time that i was also working on the
push cart war i became very close friends with morris sendak and we actually became really close
and i wrote a book at morris's bidding because he was supposed to write it and then he decided he
couldn't a book for abrams about his artwork and at one point morris called me and said that he had
just uh been introduced to a children's opera written right before the holocaust in czechoslovakia
by a wonderful composer named hans kraza who died he was murdered in ashwitz and uh it's called
brindabar um which is czech for bumblebee and it's a wonderful little children's opera it's
absolute masterpiece um about two little kids whose mother gets sick and they want to get milk for her
so they go into town together to find some way to get milk for their mother and they
decide they'll sing in the town square and people will give them money because they see a teenage
boy named brindabar who has a organ is an organ grinder and he plays his organ and people throw
money in his cup so the two little the boy and the girl decide to try that and brindabar chases
them away and they enlist the help of a a bird and a dog and a cat and some school kids to chase
brindabar away from the square and it's all about in it's it's an astonishing children's opera with
a very painful history because it was first performed in the prog ghetto and then in terrace
and concentration camp and morise asked me to do an english language libretto we did a production of
it uh of the opera and morise wanted to do a children's book so he did a children's book and
the moral of the story is since we're getting close to Passover it's the it's the moral of
Passover that in every generation pharaoh rises up there's always a bully there's always somebody
who will come and try and take more than their fair share and behave abusively and pick on people
who are weaker or who they imagine are weaker and if you work collectively and collaboratively
i mean that's one of the great glories of the push cart war is is that the push cart they all
gather in the in the garage of maxi hammer man who is the push cart king i've often wondered i wish
i could ask gene this question in the fifties when she was wandering around grannish village
getting the idea for this at the theater delice which is now the lucille lortel theater is mark
blitzstein had started this very famous production of his translation of three penny opera the brecht
vial with laudi lenya in it and some of the aspects of the push cart war made me wonder if
she was influenced by that but they the push cart peddlers gather together and it's because they
work together and because they work as a collective that they're able to overcome this and that's
also true in brunder bar it's a sort of a good a good lesson from socialist children's literature
that yeah that if we if we pull together we can become powerful individually we're we're powerless
it's it's so interesting that you brought up morris sendek because when you were talking earlier
about the difficulty of getting the book adapted into a film and how you know this is what's
interesting about this book is that there are no children in it although it is a children's book
while we were prepping for this episode i was saying you know if you think of some of the
stories that are most beloved in in cinema by children star wars being a great example there
are no kids in the original star wars right and yet somehow later george lucas decided he had to
center everything around you know nine-year-olds or whatever or cute little teddy bear aliens
but then morris sendek too you know i i think you know part of morris sendek's
philosophy was that children are okay with being scared like there's a certain point
up to which you can push them to being scared and that that's how they learn lessons and
you know a little bit of fear is good i think of where the wild things are is like a kind of
scary book yeah oh absolutely and um and and there there is like the fear in this book of
violence you know that the that large object theory of history that the truck drivers are
literally the first inciting incident of this book is an act of violence someone with a truck
ramming a small wooden pushkark and throwing the morris the florist into a barrel nearby
basically yes and and ronnie's drawing of that is fantastic it's one of the great you never forget
it these flowers going everywhere and you know it's about people destroying private property
which is you know really uh forbidden i mean they're shooting peas into truck tires and flattening
them it's it's it's domestic terrorism yeah well i mean when i was reading at this time i i just
couldn't stop thinking about when they were describing the pea shooters and how the pea
shooters go viral i mean obviously they don't use that term but that's what happens the kids
get the idea and it goes wild like without anyone trying to make that happen it happens and i could
not stop thinking about the whistles in minneapolis and the way that it went from a few people using
whistles to then these 3d printing projects with tens of thousands of whistles and the decentralization
of what has happened in minneapolis and other cities that have been confronted you know very
directly well and the history i mean the the disappeared in in in chile and the women who
marched down the streets banging pots and pans and then during coveted in new york and in many
other cities people getting out on their terraces and banging pots and pans and these sort of
spontaneous appearances of you know uh somebody has an idea but if the idea is poetic enough
and and practical enough and in the case of the pea shooters and the peas effective enough or the
whistles then it really catches fire and becomes this this sort of uncontainable problem for the
establishment and can only solve by solving the problem it can't wish it away and of course maxi
hammersmith is in the middle of the novel is arrested which also made a big impression on me
i guess i was born in 1956 so i was eight years old when i was reading this thing and he went to
jail like martin luther king went to jail you know it was this was like a big you know it was it was
sort of serious it was very funny the whole book is is delightful but it has this kind of slightly
i remember the the the drawings of the the three truck owners all have uh first and last names
that start with the same letters but one of them's name is walter sweet and it was something sort of
sinister about that because it was i think what they would call apotropea against it's you know
he's anything but sweet but they were scary guys i mean they were meeting in these grimy
dark rooms and they were planning things and the truck drivers so there is fear in it and it's uh
and yeah you're right i mean when my niece kira was a little girl i bought her outside over there
morris's magnificent book after uh where the wild things are and i read it to her the first night
and she had nightmares she couldn't sleep and her mother was mad at me that i had and then
the next night kira came up to me and said read it again and we read it like 600 times and i
realized what she was doing which is what kids do with literature is you read it over and over
it's not so scary that you you know have to crawl under the bed and just shiver you have a sense
that you can get control of this thing that's scaring you if you stick with it and they and
most great children's literature is about that and it doesn't the other thing that morris and gene
have in common is there's no condescension at all i mean it's not it's not icky sticky
kids stuff you can tell you're being uh they're talking about serious matters and they're talking
about them seriously and yeah and you're not being talked down to so i was thinking that along the
lines of donald trump and bullies there's another piece of that that the truck owners and the big
three the truck companies have in common is that they perceive themselves to be the victims
they they have all the strength all the power they literally have a backdoor channel
to mayor cudd there's all this behind the scenes you know smoke filled room kind of dealings and the
push cart workers and owners have no power no access to the mayor but over and over again
you hear them say things like to the mayor you need to make the streets safe for trucks that's
one of my favorite lines because it's so you know related to the war on cars we see every time we try
to you know put in a bike lane or take parking and turn it into public seating the car owners who
you know have immense power in the city relative to their numbers cry victim yeah they are they
are the victim and also of course the regime that is leading us god forbid you criticize
any of them they are the victims trump is always the victim this is for time immemorial has been
the way that oppressors disguise the true nature of power in society by claiming that there you
know i mean this is laban's realm for the nazis i mean you know the rine was stolen from us and
the corridor was stolen from me and we've got to we've got to make you know our place in the world
and and it's uh it's a very effective tool as long as it lasts you know we're being invaded by
people from other countries i mean christine um went down yesterday screaming and yelling about
this my videos have been shown in the countries where the invasions are coming from and i was like
what the hell are you talking about anyway yeah there's a great power to the simplicity of the
push cart workers and their allies so there's the character of um wendig ambling who is this actress
sort of larger than life character who takes the side of the push cart vendors and advocates for
them she's on a television show according to the book and they're talking to her about the problems
on the street and the traffic and how bad it is and she just very flatly says well i think there
are too many trucks and that the trucks are too big and i think there is a great power that we
find ourselves in now especially as we see ourselves you know illegally invading another
country where the people with the least power are stating the most simply this war is wrong period
full stop where the people with power our democratic senators let's say are using this mealy mouth
language of well we all agree iran is bad we should topple its leadership blah blah blah
and it's like well once you start there you open up the door then of course to the bullies to the
bigger and more powerful people saying yeah and that's why we're just going to barrel our way
through the world but i love that wendig ambling just states so clearly this isn't right and something
needs to change i think we need more of that yes absolutely there's a one of brecht's last poems
might even be his last promise because and i always thought the very simplest words must be
enough you'll forget the whole poem is the very simplest words must be well i tell you how things
are your heart will be torn to shreds you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself surely
you see that and it's so you know this is and it's also you know gene and ronnie were a couple
they were lesbians and nobody knew that back then but there's a there's a attention that's
being paid in the in the book to women characters that you feel like has to come in part from
their politics and the sort of early feminist uh politics and and uh and it's great that wanda
who is who's drawn and sort of set up as like a kind of uh everybody expects her to be a dumb
starlet you know a blonde peroxide blonde but she turns out to be a lot smarter than yeah and at
the end she she makes it she reappears at the end they're gonna make them she plays i mean she may
play general anna and which is a great little joke which is funny because general anna is you know
not glam not a glamorous figure and there is i mean that that makes so much sense to me that
they were a couple and you know just because you know there is this outsider
sensibility this queer sensibility for you know or or sort of you know the idea that the people on
the outside are worth something i mean there's one of the vendors who lives underneath his card he
hasn't slept in inside for 60 years or something until he has to when he's hiding out you know and
and sort of and he's presented as being just as valid as as anybody else everybody's oddities and
idiosyncrasies that might make them anathema to normal society are accepted and loved and and
there's just so much of that kind of solidarity among sort of the misfits of of society they
become an ecosystem you know in a way where each little odd piece sort of fits in with the other i
love it yeah and they're and they're they're like undocumented workers in in our country right now
they're providing this essential service uh or services because they in addition to what they
sell in their push carts and the role that they play in the street level economy is a beauty to
them i mean the the carts are small and beautiful and uh it's interesting it's in the you know this
book comes from uh the sort of the jane jacob's era of activism on the street level of the fight for i
think that if i remember correctly the fight for tomkins square park was uh was a part of there was
some move to sell it to developers and i think maybe gene and ronnie lived nearby in the east
village but there was there was a lot of movements the anti-war movement the anti-nuke movement
socialist movements and so on and i would imagine uh queer liberation and feminism a lot of things
sort of float into this moment of fighting for the the character of american cities and it's you
know the end of the robert moses era it's about two or three years before joe pape is going to take on
robert moses in the fight for the delacorte theater and and beat him for the first i think one of the
first times moses was was defeated you know and i think it's interesting to be doing this in the
mom danie the beginning of the mom danie era where uh this guy gets up and articulates a vision
of a of a of a new york city that is actually about human beings and not about the stock market
and real estate and wealth but about the people that actually inhabit and make the city city and
mom danie's articulation of the idea of equitable taxation and rent control and all is greeted with
such horror by eminent i mean since you were in this read the lovely review from the new york times
they got it right about the push cart war they sure got it wrong about zoran mom danie
yeah and they continue to stick by their guns and i mean guns and and insist that everything he
does is wrong but he's clearly you know this is a person who the push cart pedals were to prove of
a thousand percent yes he would have he would have been down there with them
in soho in grenadj village you know standing off facing off against the trucks let's take a break
right there we'll be back after this i woke up to the sound of rain this morning a nice soaking
steady rain considering that i have a ton of errands to do today you might think that would
discourage me not a chance because i know i can just throw on my clever hood ranger rain cape
and i'll be all set to go wherever i need to go by bike or by foot the visor even keeps my glasses
dry you can feel good about the rain too just go to cleverhood.com slash the war on cars
and enter code puddle jumper to get 15 off the ranger and everything else in the clever hood
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there is a great section of the book where the push cart vendors appear to have a temporary
victory or even longer than that and they describe what has happened that the trucks are sort of all
banished and can't make it into the city and can't move from where they are and um meryl writes
everyone was in the best of spirits that first day that the trucks did not appear on the streets
it was like a holiday the buses were loaded with ladies out shopping for new hats and perfume
fathers took the afternoon off from their offices to take their children to the zoo teachers gave no
homework there were picnics in the park and the movie houses and bowling alleys were crowded
and i love that because that is the war on cars vision of new york city in many ways that is the
open streets version of new york city that is the congestion pricing vision and version of new
york city but it's also a vision of what happens when the powerful are vanquished and um how much
power we have just in coming out in public space not really a question so much as just more of one
of my favorite parts of this book reading it for the who knows how many times you know it's also
has resonance in this era of ai that the people that seek to profit most off of technology always
look to replace human beings with machines of one kind or another and uh or now with machine
learning it's always a bad idea there's always oppression concealed within it and it's always
a great thing when we remember that the any totality that doesn't anything that ends without
the human as the ultimate is dangerous the business of business is business the business of everything
is human is humanity is human beings and it's an endless fight to reassert whether it's trucks or
guns or computers or ai or whatever it's an endless fight to reassert the presence of the human
against the commodified technocratic and and uh it's a fight that will probably never end but
has to be reengaged in every generation yeah absolutely and you know you talking about
mamdani and the sort of vision of new york that he's bringing it's the it's the vision of somebody
who spends time on the street and who is with people as they are going about their business
on the street and of course this is one of the things that every new yorker loves about new york
and it's one of the great privileges of my life that i was able to be a push cart vendor my first
job out of high school yeah my first job out of high school i was i've i sold ice cream from a push
cart on 45 no it was chipwitch um which was a chocolate chip ice cream sandwich novelty yeah
so it was the first summer they were available and i was sent out with my cart on the first day
and i had to figure out where i could set up i tried to set up at the corner of 45th and lexington
we started out on uh over by the un that's where they unloaded our carts for us and we had to push
them to someplace that we thought we could sell them i started at the corner of 45th and lexington
and there was a hot dog guy there who very quickly let me know that was not going to be okay and then
i went up and and stood uh on 45th street right where the entrance to grand central station
grand central terminal is and it was a it was an ecosystem of push cart vendors there at that time
there was a guy selling egg creams from push cart there was a lebanese guy selling high-heeled
shoes to the office workers and there was a guy who would show up and roller skate around
selling rubik's cubes and doing this rubik's cube wrap he was amazing and but we all had each
other's back like when one of us had to go to the bathroom the other one would watch their cart
that kind of thing and um every now and then the cops would come by and try to do something about
it but they didn't really and so that that feeling that you get on the street that way of getting to
know other people you know you've spent a good part of your life on the upper west side the streets
of new york are very much where you exist in a way right so you know i'm interested in your
perspective about how robust that street ecosystem is these days like what do we still have here in
new york and how can we try to hold on to it because it seems to me that it's it's vanishingly rare
in this country to have streets where that ecosystem exists and is so is so thriving
yeah well i mean there is nothing like new york it's it is it is the weirdest and the most remarkable
um variety of ecosystems because i mean you you know you you can lament the loss of i mean what
jane jake was warned about that in order to have a robust street scene you had to have shops
open shops you know on on street level that that was essential and that's what the 19th century really
developed and a lot of that got eaten up by starbucks and dwayne reid and banks in the in the 70s and
80s and rising rents on stores but even in areas like the upper west side where that you can sort
of trace the diminishment of that you can go to avenues in in queens and when i was working on my
play about afghanistan and i'm gonna forget it's in jackson heights there is an area of queen's
boulevard i think called little cobble and uh i was this was in the before 9 11 and i was researching
about afghanistan and there was nothing really available in libraries but i went to jackson
heights and there was this little expatriate afghanis afghan community that you could talk to people
on the street and they you know and and all over the city there are these this wild variety of
beings and human societies and human cultures and then public transportation which
you know there's nothing better nothing i love when i was a baby my mother said
if i was cranky and she wanted to get me to stop crying she would take me down into the subway
station because i loved the sound of the trains going by and i would stop crying and maybe that's
why i love but i love the subways i couldn't live without riding the subways they're the great equalizer
in many ways absolutely and they're a school for they they teach us how to be new yorkers how to
live i went into a train a couple of weeks ago and there was a homeless guy who was passed out
and sleeping under some of the seats there are like five or six other people on the train
and this young guy gets on the train and looks at this man sleeping on the thing in disgust
and sort of walks up and starts nudging him with his shoe to wake him up and this older woman across
the aisle says to the young guy leave him alone he needs the rest and the young guy sort of laughs
and then goes and sits somewhere else and and it was like you know you just you you see that all
the time it's it's you know sometimes the subways can be not so nice but it's this thing i mean when
i go to los angeles and everybody's in these cars and they're stuck for hours to get five inches you
have to plan half your day and you're everybody's in this little isolated bubble and you know in
new york not only can you get places but you you get fed into this tube or on the buses where
where that's really where the melting pot happens is it's a mixing pot it's it's everybody gets
scrambled together and you you get a sense of the incredible heterogeneity of the city and it's
there's a reason why minneapolis i mean i got a little annoyed as a new yorker i i think i mean
i admire what the people in minneapolis did in resisting i so much and i have spent time in
minneapolis and there is a a certain very civic minded aspect to minneapolitans they're very serious
about their city but most people in most cities are and they're and what you're seeing in part is
of course something of which minneapolis ought to be proud and minnesota in general but it's also
something that people in cities i mean you know carl marx called people who live in the country
he said it's rural idiocy and he said you know you're really only going to get smart progressive
people in cities because we the more packed in we are the more we learn how to live with each other
and the more we learn about each other the less we can avoid yeah the strange and the new we can't
we can't surrender too much to our fears and conservatism and reaction are fear-based you
can't really be a chicken in new york city you have to have the courage to go and see what this
person is selling in that pushcart even if you've never smelled anything quite like it you everybody
seems to be eating it and it's interesting so you go and you try it and it's the the homo sapiens
advance when we started forming ourselves into cities and towns and it's it's essential to the
life of the species i do i'm gonna i need to establish my pushcart bona fides here because
i grew up with stories and and knowing my great-grandmother liby learner and when she immigrated
to this country in the 1920s with my grandfather Aaron learner they had a vegetable cart that they
pushed around and later had got a horse or rented a horse essentially uh do be the horse i was my
childhood was filled with stories about that and they would get vegetables and it was that ecosystem
sarah that you were talking about that you know sometimes cash would be exchanged for fruit and
vegetables but other times they would just trade the things that they needed you know give a head
of lettuce to someone or cabbage and get back a shoe repair or something like that and you
know in thinking about the pushcart war and the trucks there's something very and this is true
about the powerful there's something very zero sum about their way of thinking about the world
whereas the pushcart vendors see themselves as you know as goes one so goes all that there you
know there's no maxi hammer he doesn't have a business if the pushcart succumbs to trucks if
the curb is given over just a parking if the streets are just for these angry beasts that are the
trucks um so that really came to mind and and in thinking about that i sort of agree with you
tony that the updates to the year that this take place i could only picture the new york city of
my grandparents and my great-grandparents i couldn't picture the new york city of today
although the pushcart remains an entry point for a new wave of immigrants absolutely yes and and
you know we have things that they didn't have back then we have farmers markets and you know
flea market you know big open for them probably and delivery cyclists who are largely immigrants
right i mean so things have changed i mean one thing that's interesting about looking at the
pushcart wars uh war now is that there are a number of references to how smelly they are and
that the air is dirty but it's before we really began you know in the 70s is when we really began
to sort of open our eyes to the fact that pollution was not only unpleasant it was actually apocalyptic
that it was going to destroy the planet and gene didn't really write about the strangulation you
know of i mean it was it was as i remember it in the late 60s that we began to have reports of like
what was that called inversion or something in la where where the air would back up and and and
pollution couldn't leave and then people started actually dropping dead and then of course the
damage to the o's i mean the heat trapping gases all that would come later and it didn't
so it's not it's not ecological it's not environmental in the in the in the most modern
sense and that's a that's a difference but it's uh it does speak to in a different way of of living
and it's the defiance of the logic of a scarcity economy that there's only so much and that
everybody is a rat trying to grab it which is unfair to rats because rats are actually really
nice animals but that everybody is like has to grab what little they can for themselves and there's
not enough to go around and and there's a vision and even in the little thing that you read of a
kind of a super abundance that that if we would allow ourselves that it's like love love is infinite
you don't expend it and run out of it it renews itself that's also true of of of sustenance and
and the planet we it is self renewing if we if we operate it from a human perspective rather
than from a perspective of profit and exploitation and so so um as an advocate as an activist you
know who's fascinated by the history of advocacy whether that's the civil rights movement of the
1960s or you know act up and things like that there's there's something wonderful about this
book because they employ a tactic that i love and that you see in other movements which is that
the pushcard vendors make themselves appear bigger than they actually are at the at the start
but they also make themselves appear smaller and more dangerous they do this sort of beautiful
thing in fact when one of them is arrested right he takes credit or he allows the media and the
politicians and the truck drivers to assume that he is responsible for something like 218,000
yes truck tire flattenings and i just kind of love that power of just like we are it's sort of
like and or you know we i have friends everywhere making yourself appear bigger than you actually
are against the empire i loved and or for that reason yes it's great and then there's a second
piece of that which i kind of liken to the what we sometimes derisively but i think we shouldn't
really see them this way as the wine moms of activism you know the sort of more like middle
class to upper middle class normy suburban population that is we hope turns against Trump
there's a great line uh when the mayor mayor kud is talking to big mo one of the truck company
owners and they're very worried because uh wenda gambling has this hat that becomes sort of the
symbol of the resistance and it starts selling for 2995 and is sold out everywhere you go and
everyone's wearing it so it's almost like you don't know who and her hat is modeled on
on one of the pea shooters the right the flowers so it's like this symbol of the resistance and
then it becomes commercially available and um you know all these children are joining and
shooting pea shooters and there's a great point at which big mo says to the mayor that you know
he's worried children are bad enough but if the ladies get into this we're finished there you go
and i love that because it's about these sort of people who don't traditionally have power
rising up against those who do and we're seeing that now yeah at least a little bit absolutely it's
um it made me also many years ago uh during the daily news strike uh i was hired to to try and
write a screenplay which i one of the projects for reasons i don't remember went by the wayside
but about the daily news strike and was only resolved finally when Robert Maxwell wrote his
yacht into town and pretended to buy the daily news and all that stuff but i remember that um during
the uh long months of picketing out in front of the daily news building i i want to say brook
aster i'm not sure it was brook aster but it was some very very wealthy new yorker who had a
like a townhouse or a penthouse in in turtle bay or murray hill one of the nearby neighborhoods
and uh she was old new york money and pro union and she would invite the striker the picketers
to come up because it was in january and they were freezing to death and she would have them
come up to her penthouse and serve them hot chocolate and sandwiches with the crusts cut off
and talk to them and these were workers and uh cardinal o'connor who i despised in every other
way was was pro union and there was this weird moment of a kind of coming together of the rich
and the powerful and the famous in in in defense of of of workers rights that was uh
when the wanders support of the push car peddlers that have reminded me of yeah absolutely so yeah
i mean there's a there's a section in the book there's a chapter where it's it consists of letters
to the editor from from people who are outraged because push cards are outlawed at one point
and there's an artist who says they like painting push cards but not trucks because trucks are ugly
dog owner who says his dog is scared of trucks but loves push cards and then there's one person in
there who asks the question which i think is the central question of the book and it's the question
we're facing on a on a municipal and a national level right now is new york being run for trucks
or for people and and that to me is sort of like the core of of what this book is asking us to
reexamine i think you're right that it doesn't need to be updated you know it doesn't need to have
the dates changed because that is such a that that we all understand this question is new york
being run for the corporations for don trump for the developers or is it being run for the people
and i i do hope that we're at a beginning of a time when new yorkers are going to be able to
engage with that question in a different way yeah and it's the question for the whole planet i mean
it's it's you know i mean and it touches on every issue and cars and and the environment and
health care and immigration i mean it's just you know what what is the point of human civilization
and fact of human existence if it's not taking care of living things and and and of the planet it
doesn't it's it's if we don't take care of the whole thing we're not taking care of our own kind
and if we're not taking care of our own kind then what are we i mean you know and it's uh it's uh
it's uh i i hope like you do that that we're at a particularly grim and terrible moment
but i think that there is a sign there are signs of people waking up and uh and becoming scared enough
and and also hopeful enough to to begin to envision new ways of of living because we have to it's
it's that or mass extinction one or the other so well i think that's a perfect note to end on
thank you so much tony kushner for joining us here at the war on cars well thank you so much
for having me i've had a wonderful time talking a huge thanks to tony kushner for coming on to
talk about this book we all love so much we'll put a link to purchase the book in the show notes
yeah i just want to say if you have not read the push cart war i reread it after many years and i
had purchased a copy from my daughter when she was younger and it is just a delightful and funny
and like we said provocative book cannot recommend whatever age you are please read it it is a great
inspiration for activism as well 100 remember you can support us and get exclusive bonus content
pre-sale access to live show tickets free stickers and more by signing up on patreon at patreon.com
slash the war on cars pod a big thanks to everyone who supports the war on cars
including our top contributors charlie g of human powered law in portland oregon
mark headland virginia baker and brandon decoster and please pick up a copy of our new book life
after cars freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile wherever you get your books
you can also find us on tour learn more at lifeaftercars.com the war on cars is sponsored in
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i'm doug gordon i'm sarah goodyear and this is the war on cars
About this episode
Tony Kushner joins The War on Cars to discuss the 1964 children's novel The Pushcart War, a satirical tale of New York pushcart vendors battling big trucking companies. Kushner shares his personal connection to the book, its themes of resistance against oppressive power, and its relevance to contemporary social justice and urban life. The conversation explores the book's portrayal of community, activism, and the fight for human-centered cities amid mechanized indifference. Kushner also reflects on his own experience as a pushcart vendor and the enduring struggle between human-scale urban life and corporate dominance.
Original notes
The Pushcart War—written by Jean Merrill and illustrated by Ronni Solbert and first published in 1964—is a charming and provocative children's novel that tells the story of a band of pushcart vendors who fight against the organized forces of big trucks on the congested, contested streets of New York City. For Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer-prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and author, reading the book as a child was a formative experience. "It made opposition, even nonviolent civil disobedience, seem fun and right and necessary and heroic, and something even someone as powerless as a kid can and should undertake," he has said. March 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the date on which the events described in the book are said to have begun. So we invited Kushner on to talk about The Pushcart War and what it can tell us about how to defend human beauty and agency against the brutal forces of technocratic capitalism.
Get The Pushcart War, plus other great books for kids, at our Bookshop.org page.
Join The War on Cars on Patreon and listen to exclusive ad-free versions of regular episodes, Patreon-only bonus content, Discord access, invitations to live events, merch discounts and free stickers!
Order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, out now from Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Find us on tour and get tickets at LifeAfterCars.com.
Thanks to Upway for sponsoring this episode. Use this link and save $100 off any order of $800 or more with the code TWOC100.
Thanks also to Cleverhood. Listen to this episode for the latest discount code and get 15% off the best rain gear for walking and cycling.
The War on Cars is produced with support from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.
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