The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  New York City’s booming oyster market was always looking for a new oyster from a new cove with a new name. If Bluepoints were hard to get, the city hungered for Prince’s Bay oysters. Then, in 1827, an unusually high wind and strong tide left almost bare a reef in the East River known as Saddle Rock. The site is actually part of Norwalk Harbor. The name Saddle Rock came from a dubious claim that the reef resembled an English riding saddle. During this particularly strong tide, for the first time in memory oyster beds became visible at the base of Saddle Rock. Saddle Rock oysters were so large that 25 instead of 250 would fill a bushel basket, and yet the oysters were tender and were said to have a particularly fine flavor. New York being New York, everyone in town was now crazy to have Saddle Rock oysters on their tables and ready to pay unheard-of prices for them.

  The popular way to serve Saddle Rocks for home cooks and street vendors was by roasting them.

  Oysters Roasted

  Wash the shells perfectly clean, wipe them dry, and lay them on a gridiron, the largest side to the fire; set it over a bright bed of coals, when the shells open wide and the oyster looks white, they are done; fold a napkin on a large dish or tray, lay the oysters on their shells, taking care not to lose the juice: serve hot.

  When oysters are served roasted at supper, there must be a small tub between each two chairs, to receive the shells, and large coarse napkins called oyster napkins. Serve cold butter and rolls or crackers with roasted oysters.

  —MRS. T. J. CROWEN,

  The American System of Cookery, 1864

  It took about five years for every last Saddle Rock to be eaten, and by the time Mrs. Crowen wrote her popular cookbook, the oysters from Saddle Rock were long gone. But New York merchants continued to refer to a number of other varieties as Saddle Rocks because it had become a valuable marketing name. They would sell for as high as thirty cents each, which was an enormous price for a New York oyster. Eventually, a “Saddle Rock” became any large New York oyster that did not already have a good name like a Rockaway or a Prince’s Bay. There was always a new oyster.

  The discovery of a new natural oyster would be covered in New York newspapers with all the excitement of a medical breakthrough. In September 1859, five oystermen from Darien, Connecticut, realized they had drifted off their course and dropped their oyster dredge as an anchor. They found themselves off of Eatons’ Neck at the opening to Huntington Bay, Long Island, some thirty miles from City Island. Getting their bearings, they hauled in the makeshift anchor and found it full of oysters. They quickly filled their boat and, the oysters being unusually large, as would be expected from an unexploited natural bed, agreed to keep secret the new location. But once they started bringing these large oysters to New York City markets, New Yorkers became curious. It took $500 to persuade one of the five to break the silence. The headline in the October 1, 1859, New York Daily Tribune was THE GREAT OYSTER PLACER: MILLIONS OF DOLLARS’ WORTH FOUND: GREAT EXCITEMENT ALONG SHORE.

  Connecticut, City Island, and Long Island oystermen from Oyster Bay to the west and Port Jefferson to the east, and even Brooklyn oystermen from Greenpoint across from Manhattan on the lower East River, learned of the spot. Since no one owns natural shellfish beds, what the Tribune called “an immense fleet” turned out in Huntington Bay. A reporter at the scene wrote that “so closely were they together that one could scarcely make out the separate sails.” The Daily Tribune correctly predicted that unless the bed turned out larger than was currently reported, it would be exhausted in a matter of days.

  Adding further to the arrogance of human beings, it was discovered in the nineteenth century that man could make a better oyster than nature. This is unusual. Fish farming and the domestication of animals, to the thinking of most epicureans, produces an inferior product. This is because farmed animals, including fish, have been penned into a sedentary way of life and are being fed food rather than foraging in the wild. This is not the case with the farmed oyster. In its natural life the wild oyster is barely more active than a plant, and the cultivated oyster lives the same life and feeds on the same nutrients in the same way as did its wild predecessor.

  If a fish market in the right Manhattan neighborhood today could get hold of “wild native oysters” and market them as such, because this is how New York operates, it would probably be able to charge astounding prices and have New York Times readers, after the article on wild oysters came out, gladly paying the price. Or at least, until they saw the oysters. For they would be large and misshappen and irregular. A dozen would represent twelve different sizes and shapes. And for all that, they would taste like the cultivated ones.

  In the small, neglected museum of the Staten Island Historical Society, there is in a showcase both the left and right shells of a wild Staten Island oyster from centuries past. It was not saved for that reason, but because someone had painted an oystering scene on the interior of the shells. The shells are more than six inches long, not much more than an inch in width, and curved like a banana. Now and then other old wild shells are found in middens or under the water and they, too, are large and have odd, usually skinny, shapes. Eighteenth-century scientific illustrations of the Crassostrea virginicus depict it as a long, thin, broad-bean-shaped shell.

  In natural beds, all of the oysters find the most ideal spot and crowd onto it. They crowd so tightly that as they grow they do not have room to lie down but grow vertically or at odd angles. The competition for space in a natural bed is so acute that some oysters manage to grow in strange configurations determined by the available space and others, becoming blocked, cannot open their shells to breathe and feed, and these die. Often in a cluster of oysters the smaller ones would be dead and larger survivors would be attached to the shells of the unsuccessful oysters.

  Illustration from William K. Brooks’s 1891 book shows oysters attached to a shoe.

  In a cultivated bed, the oyster’s life has one difference from a natural bed: Since they are planted by man, they are carefully laid out at a comfortable distance so that the shells have room to grow in a round and ample shape. Not only that, but the cultivator chooses the size. The oysters could grow quite large if left ten, twelve, or more years. It would not be profitable to raise a product that took fifteen years of growth before harvesting. Two to three years’ growth is a more economically viable time for Crassostreas—the European flat oyster takes longer—and this produces a size that most people find agreeable. A three-year-old New York oyster is not as big as a three-year-old Chesapeake oyster, but it is a size that most people find pleasing and a few dozen could be served and all be more or less the same shape and size. Most people do not want to eat an oyster the size of a plate.

  The important difference with cultivation was that New Yorkers now had an endless supply of oysters and they could almost make them to order. The technology would become increasingly refined, until by the midtwentieth century, scientists could artificially inseminate an oyster—as though an oyster’s life wasn’t dull enough already.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Crassostreasness of New Yorkers

  “It’s a very remarkable circumstance, sir,” said Sam, “that poverty and oysters always seem to go together . . . . Blessed if I don’t think that vena man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings, and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation.”

  —CHARLES DICKENS,

  The Pickwick Papers, 1836

  “Fifty years ago New York was little more than a village,” wrote Captain Frederick Marryat, the popular British author of maritime adventures, in 1838. “Now it is a fine city with three hundred thousand inhabitants.” By the 1830s, Manhattan was a fast-growing metropolis. In 1835, 250,000 people lived there, mostly between the Battery and Bond Street, which is in today’s East Village. “Trees are few,” observed Edgar Allan Poe in 1844, “but some of the shrubbery is extremely picturesque.”

  Pigs still wandered the streets eating garbage that would otherwise have remained on the pavement. “Ugly brutes they are,” wrot
e Charles Dickens after a visit to New York. The city was expanding rapidly north. The Harlem line provided railroad service to northern Manhattan. While many merchants still lived above their downtown stores, those who had become wealthy were joining the nouveaux riches, buying or building houses in new neighborhoods farther up the island at prices that astounded the middle class, while the old-money families were still installed along the Battery and on Broadway.

  George Templeton Strong, a leading New York lawyer from one of the old families, who kept a diary between 1835 and 1875, wrote in 1840, “I took a walk up to Eighth Street and down again. It’s a pity we’ve no street but Broadway that’s fit to walk in of an evening. The street is always crowded, and whores and blackguards make up two thirds of the throng. That’s the one advantage of uptown; the streets there are well paved, well-lighted, and decently populated.”

  Ten years later, in 1850, he wrote, “How this city marches northward! The progress of 1835 and 1836 was nothing to the luxuriant, rank growth of this year. Streets are springing up, whole strata of sandstone have transferred themselves from their ancient resting-places to look down on bustling thorough fares for long years to come.”

  As the city grew, the water supply became an increasingly serious problem. In 1828, the city did not have enough water to contain a major fire. In 1832, European trade brought with it to Manhattan a cholera epidemic. The principal cause of death in cholera cases is dehydration, and in New York in 1832, there was not enough uncontaminated water for the patients to drink. The last week of June and first week of July that year, Bellevue Hospital received 556 cases, of which 334 died by the first week of August. On the Fourth of July, former mayor Philip Hone wrote:

  It is a lovely day, but very different from all the previous anniversaries of independence. The alarm about the cholera has prevented all the usual jollification under the public authority. There are no booths in Broadway, the parade which was ordered here has been countermanded, no corporation dinner and no ringing of bells.

  Cholera victims were literally begging for clean water. By October, five hundred New Yorkers had died. The city responded with a ten-year project, damming the Croton River, a tributary of the Hudson, creating a reservoir, and building an aqueduct. With the project’s completion in 1842, the city announced that water needs had been secured for the next one hundred years. By the 1860s, the city was expanding the reservoir to meet additional needs.

  Cholera was not the only bug to arrive through the port. Once the Croton Reservoir system was built, it became apparent that New York had at some earlier point been invaded by the German cockroach, Blattella germanica. Now the cockroaches, dubbed Croton bugs, found a new transportation system through the wet pipes that serviced the city, thereby revealing their best secret—it is not food but water that cockroaches seek.

  A huge holding tank to the Croton Reservoir was located in the newly expanded area of the city up on Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street where the New York Public Library now stands, and with its walls and promenades it became a city park. Edgar Allan Poe wrote:

  When you visit Gotham, you should ride out the Fifth Avenue, as far as the distributing reservoir; near Forty-Third Street, I believe. The prospect from the walk around the reservoir is particularly beautiful. You can see from this elevation, the north reservoir at Yorkville; the whole city to the Battery; with a large portion of the harbor, and long reaches of the Hudson and East rivers.

  Philip Hone, on the other hand, wrote in his diary for October 12, 1842:

  Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water; fountains, aqueducts, hydrants, and hose attract our attention and impede our progress through the streets. Political spouting has given way to water-spouts, and the free current of water has diverted the attention of people from the vexed questions of the confused state of the national currency. It is astonishing how popular the introduction of water is among all classes of our citizens, and how cheerfully they acquiesce in the enormous expense which will burden them and their posterity with taxes to the latest generation.

  This 1836 map shows that most of Manhattan above 12th Street is still countryside with streams, marshes, woods, and swamps.

  COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Hone continued in this vein for some time afterward, referring to political rhetoric as “a great spouting” and generally regarding an urban water supply as a superfluous luxury.

  Manhattan grew so rapidly that New Yorkers had not thought to provide the transportation for what was becoming more than a short walk. Charles Mackay wrote in the 1850s, “The New Yorkers consider themselves and are considered by others a fast people; but they have no Hansom and, indeed, no cabs of any description. They have not yet advanced beyond the old hackney-coach with two horses, which disappeared from the streets of London more than twenty-five years ago.”

  But even New York’s fiercest critics agreed that the city had two good things, oysters and Broadway. Even British visitors Fanny Trollope and Charles Dickens, who praised little about America, praised Broadway. Charles Mackay, who praised much about America, wrote, “There is no street in London that can be declared superior, or even equal, all things considered, to Broadway. Broadway monopolizes nearly all the good pavement as well as cleanliness of New York.”

  Broadway was fine, but nearby, that once sylvan setting, the Collect, was becoming infamous. Abandoned was the proposal of Pierre L’Enfant, the engineer who designed Washington, D.C., who wanted to clean up the pond and landscape the surrounding area so that as the city expanded it would have a central park.

  Manhattanites had their vision set farther uptown. Arguing that it would give the city the international panache of a London or Paris, in 1853 the wealthy merchants of Manhattan convinced the state to give the city authority to take over more than seven hundred uptown acres and build the first landscaped public park in the United States, Central Park.

  The idea of making the pond the center of a canal from the Hudson to the East River had also been rejected. The prospering city would have had the funds to clean up the Collect, but they decided on what they thought to be a more cost-effective solution. In 1807, the city council spent five cents a load, a total of $3,095.92, on hauling dirt to the Collect and filling it in. By 1813, the pond had been completely filled in and the neighboring hilltop once favored by picnickers was leveled. Not for the last time, the city’s solution was to level the neighborhood and turn it over to real-estate speculators. Those who had industries around the Collect hung on to their land. The reasoning was that as Manhattan expanded north, anyone who owned an empty lot ready for development in the middle of the city could eventually sell it for a fortune. Wealthy leading Manhattan families also invested in the area. But while the wealthy were eager to invest, they did not want to live there. No one really did, because it was associated with dampness, filth, and disease. The engineers had dried out the land where the pond had been, but the earth remained moist and muddy and houses would shift and even tilt. The slightest rain or snow could flood all the basements in the neighborhood. Mosquitoes and disease still bred in the dampness. All that was left of the waterway was an open sewer that ran to Canal Street.

  The island at the center where executions had taken place was turned into a prison, nicknamed the Tombs, because the building was modeled after a drawing of an Egyptian tomb. The first execution at the Tombs took place in 1839. A man had married a Hot Corn Girl, as the famously beautiful corn venders on the streets of the Collect were called. Because of their beauty, they were reputed to earn a good living hawking corn. But after marriage it turned out the earnings of this beautiful Hot Corn Girl were not what her new husband had expected, and so he killed her, which became the first capital crime in the short-lived prison, which soon was replaced because it began to sink in the landfill.

  The landlords had built wooden buildings two or two-and-a-half stories high in the Collect, suitable for shops and a shopkeeper’s apartment above. But only people w
ho had no other choices moved into the neighborhood. By 1825, with the immigrant population of New York City a little more than 10 percent, the Collect—it was still called the Collect for years—was one-quarter immigrants and another 15 percent free blacks. Then, in 1845, a blight struck the potato crop of Ireland, a nation so impoverished that potatoes were the population’s principal food source. Hundreds of thousands starved to death, and between 1847 and 1854, 1.6 million Irish, about a fifth of the population, moved to the United States. By 1855, 51 percent of New Yorkers were foreign-born. The Collect was 72 percent foreign-born.

  The immigrants went to the Collect and the landlords, finding that the neighborhood needed more but cheaper apartments, broke up their two-and-a-half-story houses into numerous small, one-room apartments, some even without windows. The landlords did not maintain the buildings because the taxes on new, well-cared-for housing were considerably higher than on dilapidated buildings with many apartments—tenant houses or tenements as they became labeled in the 1840s. According to newspaper accounts, tenement apartments were barely furnished. Few tables, chairs, or even beds were to be found. The tenants slept on piles of dirty rags or straw. There was a great deal of outrage about the discovery of men and women together in various states of undress and horror that whites, blacks, and Asians were all mixed together. “White and Black, Black and White, all hugemsnug together,” in the words of one of the first of many tourists to go slumming in the Collect, Colonel Davy Crockett. Crockett, giving New York street toughs their due, also wrote, “I thought I would rather risk myself in an Indian fight than venture among these creatures after night.”