The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  The building was in a neoclassical style that most Londoners would have found slightly behind the times by the 1820s. A generation after the Revolution, while New Yorkers dogmatically asserted their Americanness and the two nations were still frequently teetering at the brink of war, a tendency remained to imitate the British in many things.

  The market had three connected arcades, an E-shaped configuration, each capped by a two-story brick pavilion on the end. One hundred and two butchers rented stalls in the new space—eighty-six in the arcades and sixteen in the far more expensive cellar stalls. There were fruit and vegetable purveyors, fish and fowl mongers, and of course oyster stands, stalls, and cellars. The deputy clerk of the market, Ezra Frost, was given a second-story space in which to live. When the market first opened it was written about as though it were a wonder never before encountered in New York. On opening day a newspaper reported that the market was “ornamented with the handsomest exhibition of beef, mutton, pork, etc., ever presented to the public.” Harper’s reported, “It’s a butcher’s store, a fruiterer’s stall, an oyster counter, a coffee shop, a poultry yard, a fish monger’s estate. It’s everything in one.”

  Oyster stands in the Fulton Market from Harper’s Weekly, October 20, 1870.

  The Fulton Street Market was celebrated by locals and visitors as the place to get late-night oysters, like onion soup at Les Halles. Midnineteenth-century New Yorkers ate oysters everywhere from September until May; if not in the markets or the cellars or the restaurants, they bought them from street carts. The Fulton Market also sold soft-boiled eggs served in the shell with an empty wineglass to pour them into and a spoon with which to eat them. Visiting Europeans delighted in the oysters but found the eggs to be one of those American peculiarities.

  Not only were oyster stands opened at the market but also coffee shops and restaurants. Sweet’s was a famous restaurant that opened in 1847. Dorlon’s was an extremely popular oyster bar. In 1866, an anonymous book, reportedly written by “members of the New York press,” was published with the title The Night Side of New York: a Picture of the Great Metropolis After Nightfall. It said that Dorlon’s was the liveliest place at the Fulton Market at least until midnight:

  If you delight in seeing the mysteries of shellfish cookery this is the place for you to feast your eyes. See how featly that slim youth with the check-sleeves and close cropped hair tosses up a stew. The young gentleman who obligingly opens oysters is the master of this profession. He is a graduate of the Fulton market; and that giving him precedence, nothing more remains to be said . . . .

  At some of the tables you will observe that solid, businesslike men are having their oysters on the half-shell, accompanied by foaming “tobies” of nut-brown ale. These are probably residents of Brooklyn whose business lies in New York and keeps them in the city until the night is well advanced, and Dorlon’s is their favorite place of stopping in on their way to the ferry.

  Originally the Fulton Market was dominated by butchers, reflecting the fact that nineteenth-century New Yorkers, like most other Americans, were predominantly red-meat eaters. But more than one hundred butchers proved to be too many and they drove one another out of business. As the stalls of failed butcheries became available, the market decided to rent them to fishmongers. Because the other merchants disliked the fish sellers, complaining of fishy smells and malodorous melting ice, the fish stalls were constantly being moved to out-of-the-way locations. Yet they were the survivors. Fulton Street fish merchants were the only outdoor market businesses to withstand New York history and continue into the twenty-first century. That would not have been predicted in the nineteenth century when meat and oysters, usually sold separately from fish, were the two leading attractions. An 1855 Tribune article on the Catherine Market, a few blocks north of the Fulton Market along the East River, stated:

  Next to the meat-trade, a more extensive business is done in oysters and clams than in any other article of food in the market. The stands, of which there are five, are situated at the southerly side of the street, occupying the entire front of the fish-market. Each dealer sells on an average about $100 worth of all kinds every day, making a total of $3,000 a week. The fish are generally sold out of the shell, and a large proportion are cooked.

  The same article reported that the Catherine Market, far smaller than the Fulton or Washington, sold $524,000 worth of products every year and that out of that, $156,000 was taken in from oysters and clams. Four-fifths of the molluscs sold in New York markets were oysters.

  For both fish and oysters, an important component of the marketplace was ice, which was gathered in the winter, stored in icehouses, and distributed throughout the year. Providing ice for New York City was an almost $4-million-a-year industry. It was dominated by five companies, of which the Knickerbocker Company, with 283 acres of winter ice on Rockland Lake a few miles from the Hudson near Sing Sing, was the largest. During the ice harvest it employed five thousand workers. It had twenty icehouses receiving five hundred thousand tons of ice in the winter. Icehouses were wooden structures with double walls with the space between them packed with sawdust. The houses were divided into partitions that were also insulated with sawdust. The ice would be stored there until taken into the city by barge down the Hudson. An ice company could lose several hundred tons from a mild winter. Earlier in the century, New York ice companies had supplied Southern ports as well, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, they were kept busy just supplying the city and its markets. New England took over the Southern ice trade.

  A peculiarity of New York was that marketing was most commonly done, not by servants and not by wives, but by the male heads of household. They would even carry the groceries home by themselves. It was common to see a wealthy, well-dressed, distinguished gentleman walking down the street with a chunk of raw meat or a bird or a fish in his hand. One man explained to a curious British visitor, “The man who was ashamed to carry home his dinner didn’t deserve any.”

  The grand, well-turned-out gentlemen shoppers could not avoid seeing that the same markets they frequented were also visited by impoverished people who picked through garbage looking for edible scraps.

  As the nineteenth century went on, the area around the markets became increasingly crowded with wooden shops, many selling dry goods. Merchants set up under awnings, outdoor stalls, and sheds, often selling oysters. By the time of the Civil War, the Fulton Market had lost its elegance and was a crowded, dirty, bustling, and dilapidated carnival. The neighborhood was also changing. By the time of the Civil War, few residents remained. They were either driven out by the market or swept up in the tide moving uptown. The lack of a neighborhood noticeably reduced the number of shoppers, though there were still the passengers to and from Brooklyn on the nearby ferries. The market increasingly turned from street traffic toward restaurants, hotels, shipping companies, and boardinghouses. By 1882, the sixty-year-old building was torn down and replaced with a new brick ornate Victorian structure, which featured a museum of maritime curiosities with an aquarium and a marine-biology laboratory in one of its turrets. This was the work of Eugene G. Blackford, a fish merchant and one of the great promoters of the fish market at Fulton Street. Within the market building he built fish tanks of marble, hardwoods, and glass in which to display living samples. But this building, too, would be torn down in time, as would its successor.

  The downtown markets, especially Fulton by the ferry, established New York’s tradition of being an all-night town. The Brooklyn Ferry service never stopped and the market remained packed with people throughout the night. It became one of the places to go late, a place to go at 2 A.M. The women in the fruit stalls closed down at 10 P.M., but the basement bars and the cake and coffee shops along the East River remained lively.

  The gas lighting was dim and the air often misty from the river and this gave an eerie smudgy haziness to the busy market where deer and squirrels and opossums and wild turkeys were hanging from beams. Black dancers from the sl
ums demonstrated tap dancing on street corners. In The Night Side of New York, what it calls the “ghostly appearance” of the Fulton Street market at night is described:

  Shadowy butchers, or watchmen employed by the butchers to look after their property, are seen flitting slowly here and there among the rows of carcasses with which the alley ways are lined.

  Particularly praised by these nocturnal newsmen were the oyster stands that served raw, roasted, and fried oysters as well as other shell-fish:

  Here and there you pass on toward the Beekman Street front of the market, little oyster establishments are in full operation under the arcade. The glowing braziers look very comfortable this chilly night and it is not easy to resist the urgent invitation of the artist who is engaged in frying scallops for a night customer, who sits inside the little stall.

  The journalists complained that the Civil War had doubled prices. A plate of shellfish now cost forty cents, whereas before the war it had been twenty cents. They also complained that Dorlon’s charged twenty-five cents for an oyster stew, whereas just up the street at Libby’s it was only twenty cents. “But,” they hastened to add, “the shellfish in the Fulton market are superb.”

  By the 1870s, journalists were denouncing the markets. In October 1877, Scribner’s Monthly stated, “There are ten public markets in New York City and not one of them is worthy of the extent of business done or deserving of praise on economic or sanitarian grounds.”

  The journalists in 1866 had commented on “the reeking exhalations that arise from the heaps of oyster shells and garbage with which the gutters are dammed.” They and the Scribner’s article a decade later singled out the Washington Market along the Hudson as the shabbiest. Yet this was the largest market in Manhattan. Scribner’s reported 950 stands paying the city $250,000 annually, a considerable boon to the city treasury. In 1869, the entire health expenditure of the city budget was less than $200,000. Like the Fulton Market, the largest contingent at the Washington Market were the butchers. A narrow street separated the wholesale and retail sides of the market. Another 450 stands operating in the wholesale West Washington Market paid another $110,000 to the city yearly. The retail side alone took in more than $100 million a year. It had started in 1814 as a place for farmers from New Jersey to cross the Hudson and sell their butter and eggs. Late in the century, the sign was still hanging labeling it THE GRAND COUNTRY MARKET.

  “The two buildings have been called bad names so often by the daily press,” wrote Scribner’s, “that we need not repeat the charges of inadequacy and uncleanliness made against them.” The journalists of 1866 called the Washington Market “the terrible old huddle of abomination, and purulence and slime. The structures were so ramshackle they seemed near collapse.” Scribner’s said “plastering and patching cannot save it from downfall much longer.” The grounds had become the home of large wharf rats. It was also infamously the hangout of thieves and pickpockets. The roads leading into the market were deep in mud, and in an age of long, full skirts, this could have been reason enough to leave the marketing to men.

  Washington Market in 1866 from Harper’s Weekly.

  But for all this, the market’s detractors acknowledge that it had exceptional food. Scribner’s reported, “New Yorkers endure all the inconveniences of a streetcar ride from Manhattanville or Harlem that they may have the traditional benefits of Washington Market in replenishing their larders.” It described the market:

  There are avenues with crimson drapery,—the best beef in prodigious quarters; and avenues with soft velvet plumage of prairie game from floor to ceiling; farther on a vegetable bower, and next to that a yellow barricade of country butter and cheese. You cannot see an idle trader. The poulterer fills in his spare moments in plucking his birds, and saluting the buyers; and while the butcher is cracking a joint for one purchaser he is loudly canvassing another from his small stand, which is completely walled in with meats. All the while there arises a din of clashing sounds which never loses pitch. Yonder there is a long counter, and standing behind it in a row are about twenty men in blue blouses, opening oysters. Their movements are like clockwork. Before each is a basket of oysters; one is picked out, a knife flashes, the shell yawns, and the delicate morsel is committed to a tin pail in two or three seconds.

  It was not necessary to go to a market to find an oyster stand unless one was overtaken by the urge late at night. They were located throughout the city, as commonplace as hotdog stands today—street carts or dilapidated little shacks with a window through which the oysters were passed. They were particularly common along the East River. Oysters were a penny each and a stew was ten cents. There, longshoremen, cartmen, sailors, and fishermen were the regular clientele. But the oyster stands at the markets were thought to be particularly good. Cornelius Vanderbilt, a native Staten Islander who accrued a fortune from maritime transportation, got his start shipping Staten Island oysters to the Washington Market.

  Nicolino Calyo’s 1840 watercolor of a New York City oyster stand.

  COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  While most of the city was quietly sleeping, business at the Washington Market would actually pick up after midnight and reached its height just before the first purple-and-orange light broke over the East River and the rest of New York started to wake up.

  While products were unloaded at the waterfront, wagons arrived all night on ferries from Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Newark, as well as the towns of the Hudson Valley, loading up and leaving before daybreak, because the New York City markets supplied not only the city but the outlying areas. Next would come the wagons from the city stores, and the last, just before dawn, were the buyers from hotels and restaurants and still a few early-morning retailers, women with large wicker baskets.

  The market favored by the city’s poor was along the East River at Catherine Street, which, though shabby, was in better condition than the Washington Market. It was a much quieter market, with only eighty vendors who called out to passersby, hoping to get some needed business. They serviced mostly the residents of nearby tenements, who ate very little most of the week. But the poor had a tradition of feasting one day a week and on Saturdays the Catherine Market was overflowing with retail shoppers. The emphasis in the Catherine Market was on low prices and the shoppers would barter with the vendors. The Catherine Market vendors reflected the ethnic diversity that was characteristic of New York, with Jewish, Irish, and Chinese salespeople. This market died down after midnight, when the city’s poorest would quietly arrive, hoping for affordable final prices for whatever had not sold. Other markets included the sizable Center Market, with 161 stands, and Clinton, with 158, and the smaller 78-stand Tompkins, 70-stand Jefferson, 66-stand Essex, and even a little 37-stand Union Market.

  Scribner’s noted with irony that the only really good market building was at the Manhattan Market, which was about to close. The market building’s nine spires made of colorful slate and ground glass stood over the Hudson—the only ornament on the Hudson waterfront. The market had been built by a joint stock company that by the 1870s was collapsing and most of the 767 stands were empty.

  It would all vanish in time. Bridges would put an end to the all-night street traffic of the ferries, and larger steamships would dock in the deeper water of the Hudson, abandoning the East River as a working waterfront. In time more food would enter the city by truck than ship, and the logic of harbor-front markets would be gone. But in the nineteenth century, there was no better New York experience than to go down to one of the markets late at night and eat oysters.

  Charles Mackay told this story about oysters in lower Manhattan:

  It is related of an amiable English earl, who a few years ago paid a visit to the United States, that his great delight was to wander up and down Broadway at night, and visit the principal oyster saloons in succession, regaling himself upon fried oysters at one place, stewed oysters at another, upon roasted oysters at a third, and winding up the evening by a dish of oyster
s, à l’Anglaise. On leaving New York to return to England, he miscalculated the time of sailing of the steamer, and found that he had an hour and a half upon his hands.

  “What shall we do?” said the American friend, who had come to see him off.

  “Return to Broadway,” said his lordship, “and have some more oysters.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ostreamaniacal Behavior

  The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  in a letter from New York to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843