The City That Ran on Oysters: New York's Lost Beds

In September 1609, Henry Hudson sailed the Half Moon into the harbor of what the Lenape called Mannahatta. The people on shore traded tobacco and maize for knives and beads, and on September 13 the ship's mate, Robert Juet, recorded that four canoes "brought very great store of very good oysters aboard, which we bought for trifles."¹ The estuary Juet was anchored in held some 350 square miles of oyster beds, by the estimate most often cited (Mark Kurlansky's, in The Big Oyster), running from the mouth of the harbor at Staten Island up the Hudson and East Rivers and across the marshes of what became Brooklyn and Queens.²

Within three centuries they were gone. New York ate its way through them, then poisoned what was left. Along the way the same shellfish managed to be the cheapest meal in the city and the first course of its most expensive dinners, in the same decades and a few streets apart.

Cellars, Carts and the Canal Street Plan

The city's oyster cellars go back to the colonial period; Kurlansky dates the first to 1763, on Broad Street. From the late eighteenth century oysters were sold everywhere: from street carts, from boats tied up along the waterfront, and in underground eating rooms.³ Canal Street, laid over the ditch that once drained the Collect Pond, became the best-known strip. Its cellars offered the "Canal Street plan": all the oysters you could eat for six cents.³ Many of these cellars were opened by free Black New Yorkers, particularly after the state's final emancipation in 1827.³

The scale was industrial. By Kurlansky's figures, New Yorkers were spending some $6 million a year on oysters by 1842, and by 1880 the city's oyster beds and trade were handling on the order of 700 million oysters a year.³ Few other foods in the city crossed classes so easily. Laborers ate oysters, and so did clerks on their lunch hour and families out for an evening walk, often side by side at the same long cellar tables.

Thomas Downing, the Oyster King

The most successful oysterman of the era was a Black man from the Chesapeake. Thomas Downing was born in 1791 on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, to parents who had been freed from slavery; he grew up raking oysters, had moved to New York by 1820, and in 1825 leased the basement of 5 Broad Street, in the heart of the financial district, and opened an oyster house. He was known for being at the docks early enough to buy the best of the catch from the arriving oyster sloops.⁴ Bankers, merchants and politicians ate at Downing's, a long way from the six-cent cellars, and the business did well enough to expand into the neighboring buildings at 3 and 7 Broad Street and to ship oysters across the country and abroad. By the time he died he was one of the wealthiest people in New York City. In 1842 Downing catered the Boz Ball, the enormous reception New York gave Charles Dickens on his first American tour.⁴

Downing's basement was also, according to accounts of his life, a refuge for people escaping slavery; he was a founder of the Committee of Thirteen, which organized resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. He died in 1866. His son George ran the business until 1871.⁴ New York's fine-dining oyster is usually credited to Delmonico's. It started earlier, at a Black-owned oyster house two blocks from Wall Street.

The Aristocratic Register

Delmonico's, opened by the Swiss-Italian Delmonico brothers on William Street in 1827,⁵ carried the oyster up the rest of the social ladder. There, and in the hotel dining rooms that copied it, oysters opened the long multi-course dinners of the Gilded Age. The shellfish that cost six cents a plate on Canal Street now started the most expensive meals in the city.

The two markets could coexist only because the harbor was so productive. As long as the beds held, oysters were cheap enough for the poor and prestigious enough for the rich. When the beds failed, the cheap market went first.

The Death of the Beds

Overharvesting came first. Natural reefs were stripped faster than they could rebuild, and more and more of what New York sold had been brought up from the Chesapeake and "bedded" in local water to grow out.³ Development filled the marshes and silted the bottoms. The sewage finished the job. The city discharged it untreated into the same water the oysters grew in, and in 1916 a typhoid epidemic was traced to local oysters. A ban on oystering followed.³

By then the decline was obvious. When the Grand Central Oyster Bar opened beneath the new terminal in February 1913, it was already serving oysters from elsewhere.³ By 1916 health authorities had shut most of the beds in the five boroughs,⁶ and the last of the city's local beds closed in 1927.⁷

What Survives

Today's oyster bars descend from both halves of that history. The Grand Central Oyster Bar, under Rafael Guastavino's tiled vaults, survives from the grand end. Newer rooms such as Maison Premiere in Brooklyn and Cull & Pistol in Chelsea Market keep the curated raw bar going. None of them serve harbor oysters.

The harbor beds are being rebuilt, but for the water's sake. Billion Oyster Project, founded in 2014 by Pete Malinowski at the New York Harbor School on Governors Island, reports having restored more than 183 million oysters across the harbor.⁸ They are not for eating. In heavy rain the city's combined sewer system still overflows, sending stormwater and raw sewage into the harbor. The oysters are there to filter water and build reef, and nobody is meant to shuck them.⁹ For more on what restored reefs do for the water around them, see how oysters clean coastal ecosystems. The city that ran on oysters is growing them again, though not yet to eat.

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