![]() ![]() In 2000 Commercial Lobster opened Yankee Lobster on the same lot where they continue to supply lobster and other seafood to their regional markets. Commercial Lobster is a wholesale seafood company started by the Zanti family in 1950. Summers bring visitors and tourists to the outdoor music venue next door. It too has a retail outlet and restaurant they opened in 2000 to serve the people working the business district. Over the Seaport Boulevard bridge, about a quarter mile from James Hook Lobster, is Yankee Lobster. Eddie said their lobster roll was voted best in Boston last year. It is a retail outlet for raw and prepared seafoods that markets to the new population of workers and residents of the skyscrapers that now line the Boston waterfront. A new building was built on the site near that building. There is a wooden building on the Hook wharf that survived the fire. To the right is the waterfront and Boston Fish Pier beyond. ![]() Manger Frank Zanti said some of his customers were now his competition. In the background is Commercial Lobster’s buying and distribution facility. Yankee Lobster retail store and restaurant. A lot of others jumped into the Asia market and it began to make less sense for him than working with his established domestic markets. When China opened up he shipped to Asia, but there was more risk. He shipped to Italy, Spain, France and other European countries. Hook got into the emerging export lobster markets about fifteen years ago. “It’s always changing and you have to adapt or you don’t survive,” said Hook. The lobster business is a shifting landscape that requires a willingness to change. In addition to adjusting to the new place, he had to adjust to going from moving a 250,000 pounds of lobster to 50,000 pounds after the fire. On Monday afternoon they were packing and shipping lobster from the new location. Knowing, he said, that if he didn’t, someone else would. Saturday morning he went over to get set up to buy lobsters to supply his customers. While the embers were still smoldering in the building where three generations of his family had worked, Eddie said he was offered space over the bridge in the seaport area. Eddie Hook with his three brothers and two sisters run the family business. It roared through the building until the wee hours of Friday morning. Late on a Thursday night in 2009, a fire started in the James Hook Lobster building. Across the Fort Point Channel, block after block of massive brick industrial buildings stretched to the wooden three-decker neighborhoods of South Boston. They were the evidence of America’s manufacturing power that had developed in the 19th century. When James Hook started business in a large wooden building built on a wharf, it was surrounded by 3- and 4-story brick commercial buildings. The Boston Seafood Show is in that part of town along with the Boston Fish Pier and dozens of business that have relocated there in the last 15 years. Seaport Boulevard crosses the Fort Point Channel and runs through South Boston’s new marine industrial waterfront zone. That wharf belongs to the James Hook Lobster company on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Seaport Boulevard (formerly Northern Avenue). We visited a few, randomly selected, to talk about their businesses and get their thoughts on the lobster business from where they operate on the front lines of the international lobster market.Īll three are located on the Boston waterfront, almost within sight of each other, with one holding down the same wharf it has been on since 1925. Lobstermen often wonder who are the dealers in Boston that handle Maine lobster. Fishermen’s Voice photoĪ lot of Maine lobster is shipped to and through Canadian, Boston and New York markets.Ĭanada processes more than the U.S., but also ships a lot of live lobster as do the dealers in Boston. The small gray building in the background, built after the fire, is the Hook retail store. James Hook building at right which survived the 2009 fire that burned a larger building atop the wharf at left.
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