I think you have a serious case of rose-tinted glasses here. The old fish market was a shadow of what it was decades ago.

Health code violations were something that was clearly thought of in the same way as the wrath of eternal damnation - something to worry about down the road. The fish was literally the same stuff that sits on ice at Safeway, marked up for the rubes. You know how there are way too many 'farmers markets' where you pay 3x the price of a bunch of arugula because the vendor counts out your change from an old-timey metal lockbox? Same thing.