The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  By 1880, the oysters known as Yorks, from York Bay, the shallow water along northern New Jersey, were no longer available. The water of York Bay was so fouled with sewage and discharges from Jersey City factories that the oysters were safe to use only as seed. Most of the seed oysters planted in Raritan Bay were from Newark Bay, while oysters from the lower Passaic were shipped by the carload to the Pacific to be planted in California.

  It began as an experiment in 1873 when Joseph Ellsworth, owner of one of the more prominent oyster firms, with a barge in Manhattan and an office at the Washington Market, sent a train boxcar full of Newark Bay seed oysters to San Francisco. The best and cleanest dime-size oysters were selected. These oysters needed to grow in the Pacific for only two years, in part because, as the Reverend Samuel Lockwood wrote in an 1874 Popular Science Monthly article, Californians were “more easily suited on the question of size than the people East.”

  Californians were accustomed to smaller oysters and New Yorkers theorized that cold Pacific waters stunted them early in their growth, but it might be that the Crassostrea gigas is a smaller oyster than its East Coast cousin, the Crassostrea virginica. The tendency was to blame it on the water. Lockwood said, “The native Californian oyster is a puny affair and it is to be feared that the Eastern oyster will degenerate in Pacific waters.” But Ellsworth hoped that the transplanted New Jersey product would thrive and grow rapidly off the California coast. It did and it also lost what a 1902 commission investigating New Jersey oysters called “the unpleasant flavor it derives early in life from the polluted Newark waters.” This was at a time when the Passaic River, once regarded as the best fishing river in New Jersey, was so foul that it emitted acrid fumes that blistered the paint off nearby houses. Riverside residents were abandoning their homes to escape the stench. In 1901, J. & J. W. Ellsworth, which had built a packing plant in Keyport two years earlier, shipped 110 carloads of Newark Bay seed across the country to planters in California. Nine days after being taken from Newark Bay, the oysters were settled in upper San Francisco Bay.

  By 1900, the market-size oysters of the Passaic River and Newark Bay, whose fresh waters were used for drinking oysters, were too polluted to be eaten. The beds became important sources of seed oysters, especially for shipping to California, but also for replanting the Keyport beds. Polluted Newark Bay was regarded as among the most valuable seed source in New Jersey at a time when seed was starting to become difficult to find.

  This transplanting of species that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century quickly became commonplace. It became a contest, like those in nature, in which the hardiest triumphed and the hardiest were clearly the Crassostrea. Europeans replaced many struggling Ostrea edulis beds with the more durable Portuguese oyster, the Crassostrea angulata, and with the American Crassostrea virginica. Ostreas are found naturally on the Pacific coast of North America, such as the Ostrea lurida, the Olympia oyster. But West Coast beds were planted with the more temperature-resistant East Coast Crassostrea virginica and the more disease-resistant Asian Crassostrea gigas, the Japanese and Korean oyster. The highly adaptable Crassostrea gigas has also been transplanted in Taiwan and China and has been introduced to New Zealand, Tasmania, Chile, the west coast of Canada, France, and Britain. The Chinese produce huge quantities of Crassostrea plicatula, which some biologists think is a misnomer and that the oyster is of a separate genus they have called Alectryonella.

  Saccostrea, the Sydney rock oyster, is Australian and thrives in warm water. Crassostrea rhizophorae, the mangrove oyster, is common in the Caribbean and Central America, including Venezuela and Colombia, though the oyster industry remains small in these countries. There are also different Crassostrea species in Brazil, Sierra Leone and Senegal, the Philippines, and Thailand. There are also unique oysters such as Tiostrea lutarea, the New Zealand bluff oyster.

  What all of this means is that while a certain diversity of genera is maintained, most of the oysters eaten in the world today are Crassostrea. No one is particularly upset about this, although there is justifiable mourning for the passing of the European Ostrea, not just because Europeans like to obsess about foreign takeovers but because most of Europe’s greatest and most famous oysters, like the French belon and the British Colchester, are Ostrea edulis, a species that produces a meaty creature with an incomparable fresh, briny flavor.

  The European flat oyster ranged from the Mediterranean to the British Isles and into Norway, even north of the Arctic Circle. But it has been destroyed by overharvesting and disease and it now exists in only a few places, including Maine, where belons have been transplanted but taste different in their new environment.

  It was not only oysters that were being threatened in New York Harbor. The tremendous variety of fish in the harbor and its rivers, like oysters, provided the livelihood of many New Yorkers. By tradition a poor family, short of money, could always gather oysters or catch a fish for dinner. It was an advantage of being poor in New York. When the British took New York from the Dutch, they had visions of developing a New York fishing industry because the harbor was filled with mackerel and cod. The Hudson River was particularly rich in both fresh- and saltwater species, including striped bass, shad, and sturgeon. The sturgeon provided a caviar industry whose product graced New York bars—a free salty snack to encourage drinking. The harbor had lobster, though they were getting scarcer. The succulent larvae of blue-claw crab, the celebrated Chesapeake residents, drifted into the summer harbor, and those that weren’t eaten by fish became crabs that scudded their way up the Hudson to Albany. In the summer, while the oysters were spawning, small crustaceans, the grass shrimp that like the brackish waters of the oyster, appeared, and in the saltier sea, little sand shrimp tempted hungry fish. Translucent anchovies arrived and spawned daily, tantalizing the toothy bluefish, Spanish mackerel, and fluke, which chased them into the harbor.

  In the midnineteenth century, sportsmen came from throughout the Eastern United States to fish in New York Harbor. Sporting publications featured articles about angling in the harbor. The American Angler, the first American magazine exclusively devoted to sports fishing, began publishing in 1881 in the angling capital, Manhattan. Most of the best fishing spots could be reached by rowboats rented for twenty-five cents an hour at the end of Whitehall Street. Governors Island was known for bluefish and weakfish, Ellis Island was the place to land twenty-pound stripers, though just north of Staten Island was another striped-bass spot. Weakfish was best off of Brooklyn just above the Narrows. New Yorkers were noted for trolling by rowing while dragging the line held in their mouth. When a sudden strike yanked their teeth, they would drop the oars and grab the line.

  But many Manhattanites, especially poor ones in search of dinner, fished from the shore. Sea drums, grown to enormous sizes, fed off the oyster beds close to the Manhattan shore. The record drum, seventy pounds, was taken in the Harlem River. But the Battery was also a good spot. Shark fishing was a popular sport. Despite the growing popularity of summer bathing, the harbor was full of huge sharks. It seemed the bathers never talked to the fishermen.

  Until the mideighteenth century, most New York commercial fishing was done with a hook and handheld line from small sloops. In midcentury, New Yorkers began imitating the New England cod fishery, launching one- and two-man rowboats, dories, from larger vessels. The city’s large and expanding immigrant population was mostly Catholic, and by Church orders ate fish on Fridays. The dories began long-lining—baiting as many as 350 hooks on a single line dragged off a dory. Much of the fishing fleet, which remained under sail into the twentieth century, was docked near the Fulton Market, where they landed their catch.

  But by the end of the nineteenth century, finfishing, too, was feeling the effect of the water having been treated for centuries as a city dump. Sturgeon catches, which had been more than one million pounds a year, giving the fish the nickname Albany beef, started to dramatically drop from pollution, which also ended the caviar industry. Fish tra
pped in shallow water found themselves suffocated in oil spills. “Shad have been driven out of the Hudson,” The New York Times reported in 1924. Soon almost every species had met the same fate. Lobster and bluefish started disappearing. Those that survived, including some oysters, were too contaminated to eat. The sharks stayed off of Sandy Hook to avoid the city’s foul waters.

  At the turn of the century, the public did not complain about the sewage nearly as much as the dye wastes discharged into rivers, a relatively nontoxic form of pollution. In the 1880s, residents near the Gowanus Canal complained of the smell but were more struck by the colors. Dye manufacturers turned the waterway a different pigment every day. The canal was nicknamed “Lavender Lake,” and poor people in the surrounding neighborhoods would stand on the canal bridges with their asthmatic children, believing the rising rank fumes had healing powers.

  But many people did get upset when the water started changing colors because it was visible. When sewage washed up on beaches, this also could be seen, not to mention smelled, and it became an issue. In 1914, the city began closing most of its public beaches in all five boroughs. Coney Island, which had a treatment plant, remained open. Sometimes the smell alone was enough to anger the public, because they believed bad smells were toxic, but it took a really bad stench to rile them.

  Newtown Creek, which wanders the Queens–Brooklyn border and empties into the East River across from Manhattan, gave off such a stink that nearby residents in all three boroughs were forced to keep their windows closed in the summer. In 1891, the locals formed a committee to sniff out the culprits. Known as the Fifteenth Ward Smelling Committee, they sniffed their way down the canal and compiled a list of culprits that included a fertilizer company, a chemical works, and a “dead animal wharf.” John Waldman, a contemporary biologist, compared traffic on the entire Mississippi and the four-mile Newtown Creek between 1915 and 1917 and found the freight tonnage to be almost equal, though the Newtown Creek cargo had twice the value. In 1872, John D. Rockefeller chose the creek to be America’s first oil-refining site. By the turn of the century, the refinery had dumped or accidentally spilled enough petroleum and byproducts to effectively kill the creek.

  Oystermen and fishermen—anyone who worked on the water—knew that the harbor water was not clean and it was getting worse. But they did not see the problem as critical until the linkage between typhoid and oysters was established. This had a growing impact on the oyster business. New York restaurants became increasingly concerned after a 1909 British case that was widely reported in New York, in which a British court ordered a hotel in Chatham to pay $1,320 to a Royal Navy lieutenant who claimed to have gotten typhoid fever from eating their oysters. New York restaurateurs wondered if such cases would not soon be filed against them. New York chefs, notably Albert Leopold Lattard of the Plaza hotel, started emphasizing recipes that involved cooking oysters thoroughly rather than serving them raw. There was a growing outcry in New York City against what The New York Times called “sewage fed oysters.”

  An article in an 1891 issue of Harper’s Weekly shows the city’s street-cleaning department loading garbage onto barges to be dumped in the harbor.

  That same year, New York City hosted a conference of the National Association of Shellfish Commissioners. The thirteen states present represented 88 percent of the world’s oyster production. At the time, New York State had a $10 million investment in an oyster industry that produced about 1.4 billion oysters a year, a significant industry considering some New York oysters were getting a reputation for tasting like petroleum. Given the things New York Harbor could taste like, critics may have been kind. New York City was still the oyster capital even though the city’s production was now little more than half that of the late nineteenth century.

  The year 1909, when the city hosted the conference, was one of the last good years for New York City oysters. The industry was being strangled. Once the typhoid connection had been established, the big oyster houses, the Manhattan wholesalers who provided all the venture capital to keep the industry growing, became reluctant to further invest in New York City beds.

  In 1915, the city closed down all the shellfish beds of Jamaica Bay because of contamination from sewage. In the summer of 1916, another outbreak of typhoid was traced to eating oysters from beds in the lower bay that had been contaminated by a New Jersey sewer line that emptied into the Kill van Kull where it met the upper bay. This was a considerable distance from the oyster beds, but the tides carried the sewage there.

  On January 27, 1920, The New York Times, reporting on the findings of a state commissioner’s report, warned that “Oysters, once plentiful and considered a frugal repast, are gradually being classed as luxuries and will soon become a delicacy.” The cause of this depletion in the oyster supply was simply stated as “pollution of waters in which oysters ordinarily spawn.”

  The news was getting worse and worse, not necessarily because the pollution was getting worse but because the ability to measure it was getting better. In January 1921, the New York City Health Department again closed the oyster beds of Jamaica Bay, which had been sending 80 million oysters or more to market every year. The New York Times announced the closing with a lead article at the top center of the front page and the headline JAMAICA BAY, FOUL WITH SEWAGE, CLOSED TO OYSTER BEDS; 300,000 BUSHELS GONE. The water was fouled with sewage, which should not have been surprising since no fewer than forty trunk lines of the city sewage system emptied into the bay. But in explaining the decision, the Health Department said that in addition to the risk posed by sewage, several cases of typhoid had been diagnosed in the area and they cited the case of Typhoid Mary to remind the public of the risk of contagion. The city warned that Jamaica Bay produced between a quarter and a third of the oysters in New York City markets and that there might be a shortage that year. The city even contacted the French government to say that they might need to start importing oysters and asked that their health department send reports on French oyster cultivation.

  An experimental oyster purification plant, which attempted to clean out contaminated oysters, was built near Jamaica Bay in Inwood. Salt water was pumped into holding tanks through which was also pumped a “sterilizing agent,” hypochlorite of sodium, produced by electrolysis of the seawater. But a 1922 report of the Bureau of Prevention of Stream Pollution cautioned that this was effective only if the oysters were not excessively contaminated and the report also pointed out that the seawater used “must not be grossly contaminated with sewage or other filth . . . .”

  The emerging data on pollution led to closing the beds, but it did not lead to a cleanup of the pollution. In 1924, an outbreak of typhoid was traced to drinking water from Englewood Brook in the Palisades Interstate Park that was polluted from sewage. But finding the source did not end the problem. EXPECT MORE TYPHOID, said a Times headline. Sixty-eight New York City cases were traced to the Englewood Brook incident, which was caused by a blocked sewer that could have been fixed in half an hour for about five dollars in expenses. The Times was right. In three weeks the number of cases had climbed to 124.

  A New York Times editorial on July 25, 1924 stated:

  The agitation about polluted streams in the Palisades Interstate Park calls attention to the general neglect of the waters in and about New York. The wonder is not that a number of cases of typhoid have been traced to a certain stream, but that there has not been more illness caused by contaminated water. It has been estimated that no less than 14,000,000 tons of sewage go into the Hudson River alone each year. The harbor and coast waters within a radius of twenty miles of New York are full of refuse of all sorts. Thanks to the ruling that garbage from the city is to be dumped further out at sea than last year, the amount of filth on the beaches has been less noticeable this summer. But waters which ten or fifteen years ago were clear are now clouded with impurities coming from waste matter of all sorts—garbage and sewage, as well as the discharges from factories and the oil from ships.

  Article
s regularly appeared in all the New York papers about pollution and, from time to time, about one oyster bed or another being closed. In 1927, the last of the Raritan Bay beds was closed, marking the end of oystering in New York City. New Yorkers, who had begun by polluting a little pond called the Collect, had now befouled the entire estuary of the Hudson River. The pollution also killed off clamming, lobstering, and both commercial and sportfishing. A New Yorker could no longer wade out or row out from shore and catch dinner. New York families could no longer earn a living harvesting the sea they lived next to.

  New Yorkers continued to eat oysters, though not as many, and oyster bars remained popular, though not on the same scale. New ones opened all the time, like the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal that debuted in 1913. But they weren’t serving local oysters. New York chefs still prided themselves on their oyster dishes, though they were not made with New York City oysters. In 1951, Louis de Gouy, the master chef of the Waldorf-Astoria, published a 170-page recipe collection on oysters alone, The Oyster Book. This was the first book by a major food authority dedicated exclusively to oysters since the slim 1894 book Fifteen New Ways for Oysters by Sarah Tyson Rorer of Philadelphia, one of the founders of the Ladies’ Home Journal. But a New Yorker could not walk to the corner and buy a roasted East River oyster.

  Though goods continued to be shipped in and shipped out on container vessels in plain sight and the city lived off that commerce, it had lost its direct connection to its own vast and once sweet-smelling sea.

  EPILOGUE

  Enduring Shellfishness