There was a story about him in Vanity Fair, a video role in an installation at the Whitney Museum, a segment on the “Today Show.” “‘I’m just like Woody Allen!”’ his daughter, Ruth, who tutors high-school students, recently told me she remembered him joking about his bit of fame. He was the son of a textile importer, but his father died before his birth. He first learned a peddler’s skills as a teenager, hawking handkerchiefs and towels in the postwar rubble in his hometown, Manchester, England. Decades later, she said, he came to adore Allen’s love of New York City. With the city — its jazz, its street life, its architecture, its appreciation for a character like him — her father was besotted.

Image GENIUS OF JULIENNE The master hawker in New York, 2006. Credit... Jonathan Becker/Vanity Fair

Ruth, who has her father’s animated eyes and elfin chin (and is an acquaintance of mine), recalled working with him sometimes, when she was around 8, selling sheets at an outdoor market in northern Wales. “You put this on your bed,” she could still hear him booming, “and you’ll be on a second honeymoon.” Later, after he moved with his wife and three children to Australia, and after Ruth dropped out of high school, father and daughter peddled everything from dinner sets to baby strollers off the back of a truck. The merchandise was overstock bought cheap from wholesalers. As Ruth remembered it, during a three-day run one Christmas, they took in $100,000. The family house had a swimming pool, she said. Her father drove a Rolls Royce.

Such success might seem like the delusional tale of a devoted daughter, except that during his years in New York, Joe Ades lived a fairly fancy life. Ruth moved to New York before him, in the early 1980s, getting her traditional education back on track and enrolling in Columbia University’s School of General Studies. On his own after three divorces, he followed her to the city, where, on the streets, he and Ruth teamed up to pay for her courses by hawking remaindered children’s books out of boxes. Then he saw the peeler being sold at a country fair, and in time he was placing huge orders with the manufacturer. Meanwhile he became an evening regular within the refined world of the piano bar at the Pierre Hotel. Having scrubbed the potato starch from his fingers after a day of selling, he liked to order a bottle of Champagne to be shared with his favorite pianist. And at the Pierre, he met his fourth wife. From her Park Avenue apartment he set out each morning, his little handcart stacked with plastic tubs of vegetables and peelers.

He walked for miles to his selling spots, journeys that defined his enchantment with the city, with the buskers and squads of breakdancers, with the jangle of ornate old buildings beside lean modern facades. And when he set up and started pitching — “Grandma gets arthritis!” he called out, holding up a conventional peeler — he felt the public’s affection, Ruth told me, in a way he never had in Britain, with its rigid consciousness of class.

He was a star amid the street life he loved. And after his daily performances, he spent his evenings not only at the Pierre but at jazz clubs like Smalls and Dizzy’s. His favorite song was “My Funny Valentine.” He wouldn’t have been wrong if, as people bought his product as much in tribute to him as in anticipation of serving carrot sunflowers, he sometimes felt the city was singing that song to him.