The Big Oyster (20 page)

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 reeking 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.”

A Five Points oyster cellar as depicted in George Foster's
NEW YORK BY GASLIGHT, 1850

The women were “all of one kind,” but the oysters came in a variety of types. Bluepoints, Saddle Rocks, Prince's Bays, City Islands, Spuyten Duyvels, Rockaways or Jamaica Bays, and Canarsees were considered some of the best. For the oyster aficionado there were smaller subdivisions. Just among Great South Bay oysters, any of which might be called Bluepoints, there were Fire Island Salts and Gardiner Salts, both of which were thick-shelled and salty tasting. New York merchants also bought various varieties from Cape Cod and the Chesapeake Bay.

The city turned to Downing's, the most celebrated oyster cellar, to cater Dickens's introduction to twenty-five hundred of New York's elite. Because of the author's nickname, Boz, the event was popularly known as “the Boz Ball.” As a youth, Dickens had given one of his younger brothers the nickname Moses, and ridiculing the nasal way the child pronounced it, Dickens took to saying “Boses,” which led to his own nickname, Boz.

Downing's at the time was
the
caterer of official events. When a company opened, a ship was launched, a steam-powered vessel first crossed the Atlantic, the Erie Railroad was extended north of the city, a bank or insurance company elected its board members, Downing's catered. When Philip Hone, the self-made man who had risen from poverty to be mayor, learned of his unprecedented catering bill of $2,200 for the event, he referred to Downing as “the great man of oysters.”

The Boz Ball had thousands scrambling through what Hone called “Pickwickian” decorations to get to Downing's oysters. The crowd, as Mrs. Trollope might have predicted, was consumed with what Hone termed “the unintellectual operation of eating and drinking” and the dance floor was so crowded that the dancing was described by one participant as “like dancing in a cane break.”

Hone, a keynote speaker for the event, who later described Dickens as “a small, bright-eyed, intelligent looking young fellow,” wrote:

The agony is over; the Boz Ball, the greatest affair of modern times, the tallest compliment ever paid to a little man, the fullest libation ever poured upon the altar of the muse, came off last evening in fine style.

But not for Boz was the agony over. Four nights later was the banquet in his honor at the premier hotel, City Hotel, occupying an entire block of Broadway between Cedar and Thames, with food by Gardiner's, reputedly the city's most elegant caterer. The first three of the extensive five courses included oysters. The first course consisted of three soups, including oyster “potage,” and fish—trout, bass, and shad—all products of the Hudson River. The second course offered six different cold dishes, including oysters in aspic, as well as roasted sirloin, saddle of mutton, goose, veal, turkeys, and capons—note the plural—and a choice of five boiled meats, including boiled turkey with oyster sauce and stewed terrapin. At last the entrées arrived, which included a total of nineteen dishes including “Oyster Pies.” Next was the game course, all from New York's woodlands: wild turkey, canvasback ducks, venison, and bear. This was followed by the fourth course, twelve desserts and six decorative pyramids. The last course was nuts and fruit. The soups came out at seven and the nuts at midnight and Dickens left a half hour later. Americans had again lived up to their reputation for eating fast and copiously.

The menu listed the soups in French, the fish, the cold dishes, roasts, and boiled meats in English. The main courses were in French translated into curious English—a
timballe
became a tamball. The French was also curious and in spots misspelled. Seventy years later, Julian Street, a magazine writer, would comment, “Broadway eats French better than it speaks it.” Gardiner's charged the City Hotel $2,500 for the dinner serving 237 people, slightly more than Downing's had charged for oysters and hors d'oeuvres for 2,500 people at the Boz Ball.

On February 4, 1842, ten days before the Boz Ball, when Boz was still in Boston, George Templeton Strong had written prophetically:

The Bostonians are making horrid asses of themselves with Mr. Charles Dickens, poor man. He'll have his revenge, though, when he gets home and takes up his pen again. How people will study his next productions to see if they can find any portraits! However, we shall be fully as bad, with our Boz Ball.

That was exactly what happened with Dickens's next two works,
American Notes
and the novel
Martin Chuzzlewit,
neither of which required careful study to find the attacks. He described oysters disappearing down “gaping gullets—a solemn and awful sight to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges, spare men with lank rigid cheeks, unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry. But there was one comfort. It was over soon.” As for Downing's and Gardiner's costly cuisine, the most celebrated food in New York, Dickens wrote that Americans ate “piles of indigestible matter.” And this was from a man whose wife—Hone described her as “a little fat English-looking woman”—had penned a cookbook under a pseudonym in which she offered such refutable delights of digestion as suet dumplings and batter pudding.

As for the young, diminutive Boz himself, he made clear that he would rather be in the intimacy of an oyster cellar in Five Points.

At other downward flights of steps, are other lamps, marking the whereabouts of oyster cellars—pleasant retreats, say I: not only by reason of their wonderful cookery of oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese plates . . . but because of all kinds of eaters of fish, or flesh, or fowl, in these latitudes, the swallowers of oysters, alone or not gregarious, but subduing themselves, as it were, to the nature of what they work in, and copying the coyness of the thing they eat, do sit apart in curtained boxes, and consort by twos, not by two hundreds.

Thomas Downing had
been born to a free Virginia black family in 1791 and was to become one of the most respected black men in pre–Civil War New York, or as George Templeton Strong put it in 1854, a “venerable Ethiop.” His parents had been freed because a traveling preacher had convinced the leading landowner of their area, Captain John Downing, that no one could be a member in good standing of the Methodist Church and a slave owner at the same time.

Thomas Downing
PHOTOGRAPHS AND PRINTS DIVISION, SCHOMBERG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

Like some of the blacks who settled in Sandy Ground, Downing came from Chincoteague, Virginia, Chesapeake oyster country, and he was an experienced oysterman when he moved to New York City in 1819. Chincoteague is an island village on an Atlantic inlet just south of the Maryland state line. During his youth, Downing had worked the small plot of land his parents had bought, dug clams, and caught terrapin, and he raked oysters. He loved eating oysters. He probably went to New York to be in the thriving city oyster trade.

But it was more than just his oyster background that drove him to the oyster-cellar business. In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was widely accepted in New York that oyster cellars, like dance halls and many taverns, were run by blacks. Cato's Tavern, a popular drinking spot for leading politicians four miles north as travelers entered Manhattan, was also run by a black man. Working-class black New Yorkers often converted their rental apartments into oyster cellars and dance halls on the weekends. Another African American niche in New York was running summer outdoor cafés called pleasure gardens, specializing in tall, cool drinks and ice cream.

Downing had followed returning troops to Philadelphia at the end of the War of 1812. There he met his wife. When he got to New York, he rented an apartment to live in at 33 Pell Street and bought a small skiff, which he rowed across the Hudson to the oyster beds in New Jersey, tonged for oysters, and then rowed back with a load to sell before dark. His son George described him as an unusually energetic man. His customers increased every year and he acquired a reputation for excellent “fat” oysters. In 1825, Downing opened his oyster cellar at 5 Broad Street.

He had five children, all born in New York City and educated at the African Free School, a school system established by abolitionists, with whom he was involved for decades.

For businessmen who preferred discussing their affairs rather than having them, Downing's was the favorite oyster cellar, conveniently located near the Customs House, the banks, the Merchants Exchange, and important stores. It stood on the same street where the first oyster cellar had opened in 1763, a street long associated with selling oysters.

Between 1830 and 1860, Downing's was a place where oysters were eaten and deals were made. The senior partner of a leading banking house described the New York merchant's life: