The Big Oyster (33 page)

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.

Articles 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.

I
t is difficult not to ask the question: Are ten million or
more people not too many to be living on one estuary? In 1790, when the first U.S. census was conducted, 49,401 people were living in what were to become the five boroughs of New York City. By 1930, when all the oyster beds had been polluted and shut down, the population was 6,930,446, almost double what it had been at the start of that century. In the seventy years since then, perhaps in recognition that the space was nearly filled to capacity, the population grew by only about half a million. New Yorkers have long regarded their city as unnatural, in contradiction with nature. They talk of leaving the city “to see some nature.” Perhaps it is not just unnatural but a threat to nature. Perhaps that many people just won't fit. After all, that is not what estuaries were designed for. Ten million people produce far too much garbage.

The original attempt at a solution to the dilemma of New York's garbage, leaving it on the streets to be eaten by wandering pigs, had, along with the sewage problem and the soap and meat-slaughtering industries, quickly turned sweet-smelling New York into a notoriously foul place. By the time of American independence, New York City stank, and it continued to be redolent of garbage and sewage into the twentieth century. The solution to both problems was to dump it into the sea. In 1885, New York built the country's first trash incinerator on Governors Island. Trash incinerators began to compete with ocean dumping. But unfortunately it was now the age of coal, and the incinerators, like the plants that generated the city's electricity and the industry that sprang up in the area, was coal-fired. Even the heat in apartment buildings came from burning coal. New York was veiled with clouds of black smoke.

In 1934, the city, losing a Supreme Court case, agreed to stop dumping its garbage at sea because too much was washing up on beaches. The city then turned to landfills, of which there were eighty-nine the year of the Court decision. Thousands of acres of the estuary's environmentally precious wetland became trash heaps. The dumps leached a pollutant composite known as leachate that inevitably seeped into the already polluted harbor. In 1948, responding to the growing amount of garbage and the ban on ocean dumping, the city established a 2,100-acre landfill at Fresh Kills in Staten Island. Unlike earlier sites, an attempt was made to seal off the seepage from Fresh Kills, and methane gas was extracted and used to heat fourteen thousand Staten Island homes. But with twelve thousand tons of garbage arriving every day by barge and truck, Fresh Kills is filled to capacity. The tallest mound in Fresh Kills is the highest promontory on the Atlantic coastline of the United States.

The reality is that millions of people produce far too much sewage to coexist with millions of oysters. Raw sewage continued to be dumped into the harbor despite the Coney Island treatment plant being modernized in 1935. Modern sewage-treatment plants such as the one in Coney Island and fifteen others built in the subsequent fifty years produced a by-product called “sludge,” a pollutant, though less toxic than raw sewage, that was dumped only twelve miles out to sea.

In 1951,
The New Yorker
published an article by Joseph Mitchell titled “The Bottom of the Harbor,” which began:

The bulk of the water in New York Harbor is oily, dirty, and germy. Men on the mud suckers, the big harbor dredges, like to say that you could bottle it and sell it for poison. The bottom of the harbor is dirtier than the water. In most places, it is covered with a blanket of sludge that is composed of silt, sewage, industrial wastes, and clotted oils.

Black gunk, devoid of oxygen, but flatulent with other gases that bubble to the surface, lies in thick underwater swamps in places hundreds of feet deep. Mitchell claimed that the sludge was accumulating in some spots at a rate of a foot and a half a year. It was particularly thick around Liberty Island, once Great Oyster Island with its famous beds. Some of the thickest deposits of this sludge were in the less salty backwaters where oysters used to like to live. The Gowanus Canal had become notorious. In the warm months the sludge there would start decomposing and releasing gas bubbles that rose to the surface, according to Mitchell, with some bubbles the size of basketballs. People would stand along the piers of the canal and watch the soupy black water boil and spit.

On Staten Island, the wooden mansions with lacy fretsaw ornaments now looked out on New York's muckiest water in the Kill van Kull. Thirty years after the oyster ban, most of these mansions had been abandoned and were slowly disintegrating. In Sandy Ground, too, where the asphalt roads were cracking, exposing the original oyster-shell pavement, the large handsome houses built by the newly prosperous African Americans who had escaped Southern poverty, now faced the fetid waters of Arthur Kill. It was not only the water that was contaminated. During the unrestricted industrial boom of World War II, the smelting plants in New Jersey on the opposite bank of the kill heaved up clouds so toxic, they destroyed the strawberry farms across the water.

New York City continued to dump sewage sludge at its selected site twelve miles out to sea until 1987. Popularly known as the “Dead Sea,” it was a lifeless sixteen-square-mile zone. In 1977, New Yorkers heard a huge explosive sound and many were certain that the methane gas bubbling up from the Dead Sea had finally exploded. But the air force came forward and admitted that the sound was caused by a sonic boom from one of their jets.

Miraculously, these waters,
even in the midtwentieth century when they were their most foul, were not devoid of life. More than thirty species of fish entered the harbor every spring, summer, and fall. Even tuna still came to New York. And there were mackerel, herring, whiting, porgy, blackback flounder, and others by the millions. Mossbonkers alone, the New York menhaden, would some years invade the harbor by the hundreds of millions. But there were some notable absentees, including the once-immense beds of natural oysters. The beds were largely dead, though a few rugged individuals survived. The destruction of the oyster population may explain why the drum population was decimated. The oyster-eating black drum, hated by Staten Island oyster planters, have been missing since shortly after the oyster beds were closed. It almost seems as though they respected the ban and moved on to other waters to eat oysters. The red drum has also become rare.

When the oyster beds were closed, the Staten Island planters had been allowed to take their oysters and transplant them in cleaner Long Island water. But they could not gather up every last one, and the ones that they missed started their own families of dozens of oysters huddled together in a clump. The surviving shellfish were too contaminated to be eaten, but they were there, and because they were there, some older New Yorkers who used to harvest them found it hard to believe they could not be eaten. The New York City Health Department and the state conservation department enforced the ban. But if a few former oystermen wanted to drift over the oysters with tongs or rakes and grab a bushel for old times' sake, they had only to choose their moment. In a dense fog or on a black, moonless night, a rowboat could make its way out and take oysters or clams, which were also banned for the same reason. These poachers would eat the old catch in all the old ways, clam chowder, oyster stew, and worst of all, from the medical point of view, raw on the half shell. According to Mitchell in 1951, “Every once in a while, whole families got horribly sick.”

Some were more careful. They checked water temperatures. If the temperature dropped below forty-one degrees for three or four days, they would take some oysters. At forty-one degrees, oysters stop feeding. Four days of this “hibernation,” it was believed, were enough to completely purge the oysters of the germs they may have taken in. Then the old-timers would snatch a clump and safely eat them raw—a Proustian moment with the “harbor oysters” of their youth.

In his 1951 article, Joseph Mitchell interviewed a Staten Islander named Poole who said of his native harbor, “It's getting worse and worse. Everything is getting worse. When I was young, I used to dream the time would come when we could bed oysters in the harbor again. Now I'm satisfied that that time will never come. I don't even worry about the pollution anymore. My only hope is they don't pollute the harbor with something a million times worse than pollution.”

“A million times
worse than pollution” happened. The silt and sludge alone would have been enough to kill oysters, which would sink in it and suffocate. But the industrial wastes consisted of heavy metals, including seven thousand pounds of zinc, copper, lead, chromium, and nickel that entered the city sewer system every day. Staten Island's Arthur Kill, once famous for its oyster beds, had become known for its oil spills. An oil by-product, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, which are worse than they sound, poisoned the harbor's water. Pesticides from agriculture were carried in the rain to the river, including chlorinated hydrocarbons—DDT, dieldrin, endrin, and heptachlor. DDT, like heavy metals, moves up the food chain, becoming more lethal in larger fish and animals. And between the 1940s and the 1970s, General Electric dumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs, into the Hudson. Things got worse in the 1960s and seventies. Asbestos and solvents were added to the mixture. The Diamond Shamrock Company made Agent Orange, the defoliant that poisoned Vietnam and also New York Harbor, filling the mouth of the Passaic River with dioxins.

The rivers that filled the harbor with fresh water, making oyster beds grow, were now filling the harbor with deadly chemicals. Four rivers, the Raritan, Hackensack, Passaic, and Hudson, empty into Raritan Bay. Concentrations of six heavy metals were found in the 1980s in the central muddy portion of the bay. They had entered the water from the many factories built on the Raritan River during World War II. With the sentiment “anything for the war effort,” these industries were allowed to freely dump into the river, and the practice continued after the war. In 1978, Raritan Bay was found to have the highest concentration of copper ever reported in any estuary, as well as a concentration of hydrocarbons. Fish in the bay were found to be laced with PCBs. The fish were often mishappen by a pollution-caused disease known as “fin erosion disease.” In the late 1960s, more than twenty species suffered from the disease, the fins slowly deteriorating and falling off. Twenty percent of all harbor bluefish suffered from it. In the 1970s, tomcod were found to be suffering from an epidemic of liver cancer, and Harlem River catfish are still mysteriously going blind.