That guy who sold vegetable peelers at the Union Square Greenmarket has died. The carrot-peeling huckster Joe Ades was a beloved Manhattan character up until his death, at the age of 75, on Sunday.

Ades was actually a pretty wealthy man, living in his late fourth wife's Upper East Side apartment and eating at fancy restaurants, but still spent his time busking downtown with his trusty peeling implements. He lived for the sale. And, maybe, for the carrots. “He was very excited about carrots,” a local fan told the New York Times.

The Greenmarket's operations manager says that Ades was a born salesman who had switched to selling peelers after children's books became to heavy to lug around town. His daughter Ruth Ades Laurent remembers her childhood in Australia, when Ades and family sold goods off the back of a truck. “He’d sold all kinds of things from when he was 15 and saw the old-time English grafters, I guess here you’d call them pitchmen,” she told the Times.

The appeal (heh) of Ades' "show" was the speed and volume of his carrot peeling, a small kind of street theater that was both compelling and strange. Laurent would often try to find him at the end of the day, only to find he'd packed up and moved off. “He cleaned up really well, but still there were these little shreds of carrots that said, ‘I was here.’ ”

Indeed he was.

Photo Chad Schneider via NYT