The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  As more moved in, spaces got smaller, a phenomenon familiar to many New Yorkers. But these tenements were carved up so that some rooms did not have a high enough ceiling for a man to stand erect. Up to a dozen people could be living on the floor in one small, windowless room. Some lived in basements, which were especially unpleasant because outhouses were overused and the waste often flooded basements in a strong rain. According to the New York Tribune, in 1850 the Sixth Ward, which was mostly made up of the Collect, had 285 basements with 1,156 occupants. Doctors working in the neighborhood said they could immediately spot cellar dwellers by their pale skin and a musty unpleasant smell that they could never lose.

  The most infamous street in the infamous quarter was Little Water Street, a short passageway to Cow Bay. Cow Bay was a small open space that had been a cove in the Collect where cows drank. Little Water Street was at least six inches deep in waste and lined on both sides with clapboard tenements, one called “the Gates of Hell,” another “Jacob’s Ladder” after the decrepit outdoor stairway that was its only entrance. The tenements were connected by underground passages where robberies and murders were committed and, it was said, the victims bodies’ concealed. An 1854 book called Hot Corn advised anyone who went to Cow Bay to “saturate your handkerchief with camphor, so that you can endure the horrid stench.”

  Along with poverty and squalor came prostitution. In the 1830s, Anthony Street between Centre and Orange had more houses of prostitution than any other block in Manhattan, and that was saying something, because nineteenth-century Manhattan was to a far greater extent than most New Yorkers cared to recognize an island of prostitution. In the 1820s, New York had an estimated two hundred brothels. By 1865, according to police reports, there were more than six hundred. Reform-minded doctors, studying the health conditions in the tenements of the Collect and adjacent neighborhoods, found five hundred brothels there alone. Prostitutes would sometimes service men on the floors of tenements where others were trying to sleep. Feeding the public’s outrage, the prostitution, like everything else in the neighborhood, was integrated. Black and white women worked the same brothels and both serviced black and white customers.

  Sometimes men rented out their wives and daughters for added income and used the family home as a brothel. Women who had been abandoned by their husbands or widowed without money would survive through prostitution. Daughters, even those who were barely teenagers, would sometimes work along with the mothers. Merchants would rent out their top floor to prostitutes. If they were liquor merchants, they would even throw in some refreshments.

  The area along the East River, with its all-night ferries to Brooklyn and all-night food markets, was also a well-known prostitution district. Catching a late-night ferry could be a respectable cover for a man arranging a tryst.

  The leading theaters of downtown New York—the Bowery, Chatham, Olympic, and Park—like their London counterparts, allowed prostitutes—of a better class than in the slums—in the third tier, where they were on display for any interested theatergoers. Some prostitutes were New York celebrities, turning up at the best parties. Julia Brown was one of the most famous midnineteenth-century prostitutes. A fabled predecessor, Eliza Bowen Jumel, born in 1775 to another well-known prostitute, grew up in the trade and was even briefly married to Aaron Burr.

  Articles started appearing in New York newspapers about the deplorable conditions in the Collect. A letter to the editor on the neighborhood in the Evening Post dated September 21, 1826, concluded:

  Something ought to be done for the honour of the city, if for no other reason than to render the place less disgusting and pernicious, it being the resort of thieves and rogues of the lowest degree, and by its filthy state and villainous smells keeps respectable people from residing near it.

  There was a growing outcry to simply raze the neighborhood, which in 1829 the press started referring to as “Five Points” after a five-pointed intersection where Anthony Street intersected Cross and Orange. Today it is where downtown meets Chinatown, the area at the foot of Pearl, Mulberry, and Mott Street below Canal Street. The idea of slum clearance was born. The fate of the Collect began a pattern that was to be repeated over the years throughout New York. A beautiful place is allowed to fall into disrepair, becoming the home of the poor and immigrants, who are the only ones willing to live there. Ignored and abused, it becomes an infamous slum and then there is an outcry to just level the terrible place and build something else.

  Along with Davy Crockett, Charles Dickens, the phenomenally popular British novelist and inveterate slummer, was one of the early Five Points visitors. On his 1842 trip to America, already a literary star and just turning thirty, barely looking that old, he visited the slum.

  It is usually said that Dickens came to America bearing a grudge because American copyright laws failed to guarantee him the enormous sums that his popularity in the United States should have earned him. But his account, American Notes, was certainly no more grumpy than Domestic Manners of the Americans, the journal that launched the literary career of Fanny Trollope on her disastrous 1827 trip to build a utopian community in America. The mother of the future novelist Anthony Trollope observed that “The Americans have certainly not the same besoin of being amused, as other people; they may be the wiser for this, perhaps, but it makes them less agreeable to a looker-on.”

  She also explained:

  Their large evening parties are supremely dull; the men sometimes play cards by themselves, but if a lady plays, it must not be for money; no ecarté, no chess; very little music, and that little lamentably bad. Among the blacks, I heard some good voices singing in tune; but I scarcely ever heard a white American, male or female, go through an air without being out of tune before the end of it; nor did I ever meet any trace of science in the singing I heard in society. To eat inconceivable quantities of cake, ice, and pickled oysters—and to shew half their revenue in silks and satins, seem to be the chief object they have in these parties.

  Some visiting Brits even criticized the oysters themselves, most notably Thackeray in his comparison of eating an oyster to eating a baby. Frederick Marryat said that the oysters were “very plentiful and large,” but he didn’t like their taste. Charles Mackay, as he had been promised, did:

  The stranger can not but remark the great number of “Oyster Saloons,” “Oyster and Coffee Saloons,” and “Oyster and Lager Beer Saloons,” which solicit him at every turn to stop and taste. These saloons—many of them very handsomely fitted up—are, like the drinking saloons of Germany, situated in vaults or cellars, with steps from the street; but unlike the German models, they occupy the underground stories of the most stately palaces of that city. In these, as in the hotels, oysters as large as a lady’s hand are to be had at all hours, either from the shell, as they are commonly eaten in England, or cooked in twenty, or perhaps, in forty or a hundred different ways. Oysters pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried, and scolloped; oysters made into soups, patties and puddings; oysters with condiments and without condiments; oysters for breakfast dinner and supper; oysters without stint or limit—fresh as the fresh air, and almost as abundant—are daily offered to the palates of the Manhattanese, and appreciated with all the gratitude which such bounty of nature ought to inspire.

  Dickens’s American Notes was regarded as an insult by most Americans in part because he chose to examine and criticize at length slavery, the prison system, and even an asylum for the mentally ill, which he, not always a reliable reporter, identified as being “on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which.” He said that American men spit and that they pirated books, both of which were true. He thought the press was abominable and the prairie not as good as Salisbury Plain and also lacking a Stonehenge. But the ill-feelings of Americans may also in part stem from what the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in probably the best of the nineteenth-century European books on America, Democracy in America, identified as an American trait: an unyielding resentment of any criticism from abroad. Ameri
can Notes, in fact, has many favorable things to say about New York. For that matter Fanny Trollope loved New York, was one of the first to declare it the leading American city, and found it pleasantly different from the rest of America:

  New York, indeed, appeared to us, even when we saw it by a soberer light, a lovely and a noble city. To us who had been so long traveling through half-cleared forests, and sojourning among an “I’m-as-good-as-you” population, it seemed, perhaps, more beautiful, more splendid, and more refined than it might have done, had we arrived there directly from London; but making every allowance for this, I must still declare that I think New York one of the finest cities I ever saw, and as much superior to every other in the Union, (Philadelphia not excepted,) as London to Liverpool, or Paris to Rouen.

  In American Notes Dickens wrote:

  The tone of the best society in this city, is like that of Boston; here and there, it may be, with a greater infusion of the mercantile spirit, but generally polished and refined, and always most hospitable. The houses and tables are elegant; the hours later and more rakish; and there is, perhaps, a greater spirit of contention in reference to appearances, and the display of wealth and costly living. The ladies are singularly beautiful.

  Of course Dickens also wrote that these beautiful American women fade at an early age and were not very shapely. But it was not “the best society” that most intrigued him. He ventured into Five Points, which he did not treat with his customary affection for London slums. “All that is loathsome, drooping, and decaying is here.”

  For all his criticism, Dickens made it fashionable to visit America’s worst slum as the great writer had. Small groups under police escort would wander the streets to ogle the poor, stare at alcoholism and debauchery, be voyeurs in what New York Tribune writer George C. Foster called “the great central ulcer of wretchedness.”

  Despite the notable lack of besoins among Americans, they did have a good time in Five Points—those who were willing to risk exposure to muggers and gang warfare. Dance halls were open all night and throbbed to fusions of Irish fiddles and African drums. Dickens complained of the lack of amusement in New York. “What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety of twist doing, but amusing themselves,” Dickens wrote. But once he found Almack’s, a black-run dance hall on Orange Street at the heart of Five Points, his sourness abruptly changes to goofy elation. He noted a “corpulent black fiddler, and his friend who plays the tambourine, stamp upon the boarding of the small raised orchestra in which they sit, and play a lively measure. Five or six couples come upon the floor, marshaled by a lively young Negro, who is the wit of the assembly and the greatest dancer known.” Dickens excitedly described the dancing as giving “new brightness in the very candles.”

  What especially thrilled him was a sixteen-year-old boy named William Henry Lane from Rhode Island. He had come to New York as a youth and moved to Five Points, where he pursued an African tradition of competitive dancing, imitating and outdoing other street dancers. He was called Mister Juba. His wild and rapid leg movements became so famous that in 1848, Mr. Juba performed in London. His blend of Irish jig and the African American shuffle is thought to be the origin of tap dancing.

  Another pleasure of Manhattan slums that was seldom missed by tourists once Dickens discovered it was oyster cellars. A few years after the Dickens trip, William Carlisle, a British aristocrat, wrote in his Travels in America, “I cannot refrain from one, I fear rather sensual, allusion to the oyster cellars of New York. In no part of the world have I ever seen places of refreshment as attractive.”

  These New York restaurants ran the gamut from luxurious to sleazy. Some of the same clients visited both. Oyster cellars were situated in that nearly unique location, the halfway-underground, street-level cellar, a normal enough site in a city where many people lived in basements. Manhattan, a city that never wasted space, had a lot of basements.

  Like bordellos, oyster cellars catered to different clientele depending on the neighborhood. Also as with bordellos, the menu was always similar, but the atmosphere and presentation greatly varied. Henry James mentions an oyster cellar in his novel Washington Square, as does Willa Cather in her short story “Coming Aphrodite.” In the Cather story, Hedger, the solitary Washington Square painter, walks with his dog to an oyster restaurant.

  Behind the Square, Hedger and his dog descended into a basement oyster house where there were no tablecloths on the tables and no handles on the coffee cups, and the floor was covered with sawdust . . . .

  Hedger, admittedly an oddball, ordered steak, which was available in some oyster cellars, along with raw, stewed, and a variety of other oyster dishes. The many oyster cellars on Canal Street originated “the Canal Street plan.” This peculiarly American all-you-can-eat formula lent credence to the contention of Fanny Trollope and many other Europeans that Americans seek to eat “inconceivable quantities.” Nineteenth-century New Yorkers took advantage of the six-cent Canal Street plan to gobble down several dozen oysters at a sitting. If they ate too many, the management would give them one that had its shell loosely open in the hopes that after a few minutes, the avaricious client would be eating nothing for several days.

  There is no record of how the denizens of rough dance halls and dark oyster cellars reacted to Dickens, the baby-faced young English visitor, but there is a clear record in American Notes that Dickens was smitten by both. He wrote that oyster cellars were marked not only by a red balloon, but also a sign that read OYSTERS IN EVERY STYLE, and added that “They tempt the hungry most at night, for then dull candles glimmering inside, illuminate these dainty words, and make the mouths of idlers water, as they read and linger.”

  A balloon made of bright red muslin stretched over wire or rattan and lit by a candle was always hung over the steps leading down to the cellar, which might be dank and forbidding or might be sumptuously decorated. It is not by chance that oyster cellars were marked by a red light, the traditional sign of prostitution. While some oyster cellars were highly respectable gathering places for downtown businessmen, others reflected the ancient link between sex and oysters. Dickens was rumored to have both consumed a great many oysters and enjoyed the services of the famous Julia Brown. Only the first of these two rumors comes with any documentation, but to the thinking of many New Yorkers at the time, the two went hand in hand.

  Dickens’s reputation is more difficult to account for than that of the oyster, which, like the author, is notoriously fertile but unlike him, has a somewhat erotic appearance. Romans regarded oysters as aphrodisiacal and included them on the menu at orgies. Of course they were also on the menu at dinners with more humdrum endings. Marcus Aurelius’s doctor, Galen, suggested eating oysters to remedy a waning sex drive. Byron asserted the “amatory” power of oysters in Don Juan. Giovanni Casanova, the Venetian adventurer and notorious seducer, believed in the power of oysters and was said to eat some fifty before breakfast. In Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century dictionary and in English literature for several centuries earlier, including Shakespeare, oysterwoman or oysterwench could mean either a woman who sells oysters or a woman of low moral character. Oysters are credited for various acts deemed virile. Napoléon always ate them before going into battle, or so it was rumored by his enemies. In modern times it has been found that oysters are rich in zinc, one of the building blocks of testosterone. Prostitution and oysters, often found together, were the two most famous New York experiences. In 1850, George G. Foster wrote this description of oyster cellars:

  The oyster-cellars, with their bright lamps casting broad gleams of red light across the street, are now in full tide, and every instant sees them swallow up at one entrance a party of rowdy and half-drunken young men, on their way to the theater, the gambling-house, the bowling-saloon, or the brothel—or most likely to all in turn—while another is vomited up the other stairway, having already swilled their fill of oysters and bad brandy, and garnished their ree
king mouths each with an atrocious cigar, which the barkeeper recommended as “full-flavored.” If we step down one of these wide entrances, we shall see a long counter gorgeously decked with crystal decanters and glasses, richly carved and gilt and the wall ornamented with a voluptuous picture of a naked Venus—perhaps the more seductive from being exquisitely painted. Before the long marble bar are arranged some dozen or score of individuals, waiting their turns for liquor—while on the other side a man with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his face in a fiery glow, seems to be pulling long ribbons of julep out of a tin cup. At the other end of the room is a row of little stalls, each fitted up with its gasburner, its red curtain, its little table and voluptuous picture, and all occupied with busy eaters. In the rear of these boxes is a range of larger apartments called “private rooms,” where men and women enter promiscuously, eat, drink and make merry, and disturb the whole neighborhood with their obscene and disgusting revels, prolonged far beyond midnight. The women of course are all of one kind—but among the men you would find, if you looked curiously, reverend judges and juvenile delinquents, pious and devout hypocrites, and the undisguised libertines and debauchees. Gamblers and Fancy men, high flyers and spoonies, genteel pick-pockets and burglars, even sometimes mingle in the detestable orgies of these detestable caverns; and the shivering policeman who crawls sleepily by at the dead of night, and mechanically raps his bludgeon upon the pavement as he hears the boisterous mirth below, may be reminding a grave functionary of the city that it is time to go home to his wife and children after the discharge of his “arduous public duties.”