Mark Parente took over Lou’s Fish Market Incorporated from his grandfather 31 years ago. Since then, he has reported every day to the Lower Manhattan Fulton Fish Market at 1 a.m. That changed yesterday.

While most New Yorkers were fast asleep, Mr. Parente arrived at work not at the historic South Street Seaport facility but at the new $85 million city owned facility in Hunts Point. Mr. Parente was among 38 wholesalers and 600 employees that closed up shop Friday at the old fish market and began this workweek at the new Bronx facility, which sits on 30 acres of formerly vacant land.

“It’s 100 times better,” he said of the fish market. “Ice won’t be melting on the fish. The fish will stay fresher.”

By 7 a.m., when Mayor Bloomberg arrived at the already fishy-smelling facility to welcome the fish market to its new home, the hubbub of buying and selling was long over, with loads of fish well on the way to tens of thousands of stores and restaurants across the New York metropolitan area. The men of the fish market were not yet groggy or eager to leave. Most used warm words to describe their feelings toward their new workplace.

“I love it,” a fish seller, Joe Zancocchio, said. “I like that it’s indoors and I have a lot more space. I’d say we got 50% more space. We have more storage space.”

Standing amid crates of salmon, red snapper, and frozen squid, Mr. Zancocchio said he started working at the old fish market in 1974. He said the transition has been practically seamless.

“Selling fish is like riding a bike,” he said, adding that it doesn’t make a difference where it’s done.

The president of the Emerald Seafood Company, Tom Flanigan, called the 1,300-foot-long building “beautiful.”

“It’s a better facility. We can manage our time and employees better here and present a better product to the metropolitan area,” he said.

While Mr. Flanigan was ecstatic about the new market, he did have a bit of nostalgia for the bustling open-air market on the cobblestone streets of Lower Manhattan.

“I’ll go back in about a year to see what the space looks like,” he said. “It’ll be a little sad that I’m not part of the neighborhood anymore because it used to be my neighborhood.”

After touring the market, greeting some of the workers, and turning down a chance to take home a large, glassy eyed red snapper for dinner (“It’s more than I can eat,” he said), the mayor told reporters that any nostalgia for the old fish market seemed misplaced.

“If you like crowded streets and unsanitary conditions and dangerous working facilities, then you’ll miss the last thing. This is all for the good, you know,” he said. “Things change, the world changes, and we’ve got to keep up with giving people what they really need to live, which is jobs and good food and safe conditions and economic development – and this facility really does all of that.”

The new fish market and the revitalization of Hunts Point is one of the central elements of the mayor’s economic development agenda. This fall, the move was put on ice when the outside firm Mayor Giuliani brought in to unload the fish, Laro Service Systems, charged that the city’s decision to allow the fishmongers to unload their own fish would invite organized crime back into the market. The main reason behind the Giuliani administration’s decision to license the fish unloading to an outside company in the 1990s was to get organized crime out of the market.

Earlier this month, Laro and the fish cooperative reached an agreement under which Laro will be the exclusive fish unloader for three years. The agreement finally made it possible for the move to go forward.

Yesterday Mr. Bloomberg said he was happy the two sides had compromised and optimistic that corruption would remain at bay.

“A while ago, if you remember, Rudy Giuliani made a big effort to clean things up,” he said. “I’m convinced that we will keep this a corruption-free industry.”

Not only will New York’s fish business stay corruption-free, according to the mayor, it will also become “more efficient.”

Despite some concerns among the people who work at the facility, Mr. Bloomberg said, “I think in the end prices will probably come down because the facility is much more efficient, particularly in getting seafood products here. You’ve got to remember that downtown was just a nightmare to get trucks on our streets, going through the narrow streets, finding places to park all of the staging so they could come in and wait for somebody else to get out before they could come in. I think when we get done you’ll find the efficiency here will help rather than hurt the overall costs.”