Three of the fourteen publish addresses inside one small box of Allapattah, in ZIP 33142. Viña & Sons at 2020 NW 22nd Street, Northwestern Meat at 2100 NW 23rd Street, and Four Star Poultry & Provision at 2180 NW 13th Ave. A Miami resident maps the same box in one of the comments below: 12 Ave to 17 Ave between 20th st and 24 st in Miami, many blocks of wholesale meat, seafood and produce vendors.
That is the closest thing Miami has to Chicago's Fulton Market, and the honest description is a warehouse strip rather than an institution. We looked for a market authority, a tenant list or a governing body and found none, so we are not going to call it Miami's wholesale meat market as though it were an entity. It is a cluster of independent companies that happen to be neighbours, and it has not been written up anywhere we could find.
The two oldest companies on the page are a year apart and went in opposite directions. Balter Meat Company opened in 1955 and is now in its third generation of Balter family management, having narrowed almost entirely to ground beef: chubs, patties and retail bricks, made to order. Miami Purveyors launched in 1956 under the Rosenberg family, is also three generations in, and went the other way, hand-cutting every steak and chop and running a custom dry-aging programme for chefs. Both survived seventy years in the same city by becoming less alike.
The third oldest explains a lot about the rest of this page. Northwestern Meat was founded in 1961 by a Cuban immigrant who, in the company's own telling, began establishing ties with Central American meat plants immediately after arriving in the United States and imported product for the Hispanic markets of the time. Sixty-five years later it runs federally inspected freezers and rents that inspection capacity to other companies. Viña & Sons, 1971, describes itself as the longest standing protein distributor in the area, though Balter, Miami Purveyors, Northwestern and Four Star all predate it, so we report that as their claim rather than as a fact.
