Guess Who's Back
Our Town downtownOctober 9, 2006
You still can’t eat ‘em, but the oysters in our rivers are good for us
Next time you’re walking along the Hudson or East River, take a deep breath. On these between-seasons days when it’s warm in the sun and cool in the shade, the wind coming off the water sometimes carries a brackish scent that smells almost balmy. It may not compare to the sweet breeze the Dutch wrote of when they landed in the New Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, but it’s startling nonetheless to be reminded that nature surrounds us even here.
New Yorkers are used to the idea that we’ve killed everything in our rivers with industrial and human waste. We no longer rely on the shipping or fishing industries and we’ve got twenty bridges and dozens of subway lines crossing over and under the river and connecting us to every borough, Roosevelt Island, Ward’s Island and Jersey. Our rivers have lost their significant and we’ve lost interest.
“Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this,” writes Mark Kurlansky in the preface to his latest work of nonfiction, “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.” “How is it that a people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from the waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there?”
Kurlansky tackled the question in his book, through the lens of the decline and fall of New York’s once-great oyster industry, and he addressed it again at a lecture last week at the Museum of the City of New York.
The story of the fouling of our rivers begins in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor on a Dutch vessel and thought maybe the river that would take his name was the mouth of a passage to China. They settled in and immediately began commercial relations with the Native Americans.
Even back then, “New York was always New York, and New Yorkers were always New Yorkers,” quipped Kurlansky. He was referring not only to the early settlers’ love of a good deal and inclination for investing in real estate, but also to the tendency of this island’s natives to create untenable situations and then deal with them when they become unavoidable rather than planning in advance.
Aside from slaughtering a whole village of Native Americans, the first notable instance of our lack of foresight was the wall that Peter Stuyvesant – a gruff, irritating guy who reminds Kurlansky of “a seventeenth-century Rudy Giuliani” – built on what is now Wall Street to protect the colony from invasion by the British. First of all, it was a stupid place to build a wall because it didn’t guard against invasion from the sea (the British would eventually take the city without firing a single shot). But the immediate effect of the wall, which separated the village from a picturesque lake called the Collect, was that people could no longer see the lake and so they immediately forgot about their former favorite picnic site and started dumping their garbage – including sewage and animal carcasses – over the wall. The place started to stink and townspeople started getting sick, which worried lawmakers a little bit, but certainly no one had the foresight to realize or care that their stinking pile of shit was running straight into the rivers.
“No one thought about the fact that these ditches ran into the Hudson River and the East River, which flowed over oyster beds,” Kurlansky wrote. “It was the rivers of the New York area that gave the oyster beds their life, and in time the rivers would kill them.”
The out of sight, out of mind mentality was so engrained that it was not until 1987 that the city passed a law against dumping sewage in the harbor. By then, the last of the oyster beds that once produced half the world’s oysters had long been contaminated by bacteria and shut down by the city.
But somehow, even when the Gowanus Canal was releasing black bubbles the size of basketballs and fish from the bay were found laced with PCBs and their fins were falling off, the thick-shelled oysters never fully disappeared from our rivers. Diseased, yes; extinct, no.
Today there are groups like Baykeeper and Riverwatch that are actually growing oyster gardens on private piers and then moving the oysters to existing oyster reefs. They’re not edible and won’t be for a long time, but they’re the best thing in the world for the water because they filter and clean the water, so much so that one environmentalist, quoted in “The Big Oyster,” estimates that “if the oysters were here in the numbers they used to be, they would clear the water in the harbor in a few days.”
It’s a pleasant daydream, but the reality is that there are probably too many of us doing too much polluting to re-create an environment in which juicy, edible oysters can thrive and reproduce. “Perhaps it is not just unnatural but a threat to nature,” wrote Kurlinsky of Manhattan. “There’s an argument to be made,” he added the other night, “that it’s not exactly sane to park eight million people on the estuary of a river.”
-- Becca Tucker
