In his 1912 article on lobster palaces, Julian Street wrote, “Let us dry our tears, go to the Café de l’Opéra and listen to the haute monde of the Tenderloin eat soup.” The Tenderloin, where many of the lobster palaces were located, was between Forty-second and Twenty-fourth streets, between Fifth and Seventh avenues. Known for its corruption, it was sometimes called “Satan’s Circus,” while the original name, tenderloin, came to mean a bribe paid to the police.
No one can say exactly who ate the hundreds of millions of oysters that were sold in New York markets, but New Yorkers seemed to be able to consume as many oysters as were available. More came to the city every year. By 1872, New York City had cornered a third of the annual $25 million U.S. oyster trade. New York operators planted hundreds of thousands of bushels of seeds to keep up with the demand. On September 10, 1883, The New York Times reported:
One of the dealers was asked whether he did not think the oyster business was increasing in volume to such an extent as to imperil the future of the oysterbeds. He replied that there was, in his judgment, some fear that before many years, the demand, if it continued to increase as it had been doing in the past five years, would be greater than the supply. The oyster could not last forever any more than the lobster, and the latter were becoming scarcer every year.
CHAPTER TEN
Ostracized in the Golden Age
A splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.
—MARK TWAIN’S
description of New York for the newspaper
Alta California, May 19, 1867
By 1880, New York was the undisputed capital of history’s greatest oyster boom in its golden age, which lasted until at least 1910. The oyster beds of the New York area were producing 700 million oysters a year. That is without including the oysters of New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, or eastern Long Island, all of which were sold in the New York City markets.
On almost every block of Manhattan, oysters were for sale from streetside stands, belowground cellars, and aboveground palaces. In addition to all this, New Yorkers ate them at home. Lida A. Seely, in her 1902 book Mrs. Seely’s Cook Book: A Manual of French and American Cookery with Chapters on Domestic Servants, their Rights and Duties, and Many Other Details of Household Management, offers this advice on giving dinner parties:
Early twentieth-century New York City oyster stand
MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
As soon as a guest is seated, and has taken his napkin and bread from his plate, the butler puts down on it another on which are oysters, clams, or melon, according to the season, neatly arranged on a small doily. Oysters and clams should be served on plates of cracked ice, six or eight on each plate, with a quarter of a lemon in the centre. Although the former are said to be better if eaten from their deep shell, for formal dinners they look rather prettier on their flat upper one. The plates should be placed in the plates already in front of each guest, after the napkins have been lifted. As the butler puts down the oysters or clams, the footman should follow with a small silver tray on which are black cayenne, liquid red pepper, and grated horse-radish. Brown-bread sandwiches, cut very thin and spread with unsalted butter, are also handed with this course.
Seely was born in Canada in 1854 with the name Eliza Campbell. After marrying a man named Holly Seely, she moved to Manhattan and set up what was called an intelligence office on Twenty-second Street just off Fifth Avenue. An intelligence office, a growing business at the time, was an employment agency for butlers, maids, cooks, chauffeurs, valets, and other domestic servants. In 1900, about 1.8 million women, 90 percent of the female workforce in the United States, were domestics. It was, as it still is, one of the most sensitive and difficult employee–employer relationships, and Lida Seely earned a reputation for her skill, tact, and empathy.
The book urged employers to allow servants their privacy and never spy on them and entreated servants to overlook their employers’ moments of ill temper. With its wealth of detail, Mrs. Seely’s Cookbook is a social document of that Gilded Age before the Depression, an age that coincided with the last great era of New York oysters. In 1890, when the word millionaire still had meaning, there were only 4,074 of them in the entire United States, of which 1,103 lived in Manhattan. In the recipe section of her book, Mrs. Seely offers more than twenty oyster recipes. These recipes tended to call for copious amounts of bivalves. “Have at hand thirty-five oysters,” begins one recipe.
Stuffed Oysters
Have at hand twenty-eight large oysters and some chicken forcemeat prepared as follows: Scrape and pound the breast of an uncooked medium-sized fowl, then rub it through a purée sieve. Mix one-quarter of a cup of cream or milk with one-eighth of a cup of fine bread crumbs. Cook them slowly until they form a smooth paste. Then add the chicken, the white of one egg, one tablespoonful of butter, one half teaspoonful of salt, a bit of white pepper. Mix all together thoroughly and set away to cool. Dry the oysters thoroughly and season them with salt and pepper. Roll them in bread crumbs. Arrange the forcemeat in half as many pieces as you have oysters, cover with the remaining oysters. Press them together so they will stick. Take one whole egg and the yolk left from the forcemeat. Beat it well, season with a little salt. Dip each oyster in the egg, then roll them in bread crumbs. Fry in hot fat until a good color. Drain on brown paper and serve very hot with Madeira sauce in a separate dish.
“Pigs in Blankets” was a very popular turn-of-the-century dish.
Have at hand oysters, salt, pepper, sliced fat bacon. Clean and season some nice large oysters with salt and pepper. Wrap each oyster in a slice of thin bacon, pinning it with a toothpick. Cook them until the bacon is crisp.
Many of the waters of the New York City area were still oyster producing. In 1883, The New York Times identified Bluepoint, today the closest New York City has to a local oyster, as the farthest oyster away, shipments reaching the city only once a week. The principal New York beds were Shrewsbury and Keyport, New Jersey; Prince’s Bay, Staten Island; Jamaica Bay; the Great South Bay; City Island; Cow Bay; Hempstead Harbor; North Port; and Port Jefferson on the East River.
Industrialization was encroaching on New York City beds. The natural beds around Hell Gate and in the Harlem River were abandoned in the 1870s because they were too close to industry. But oystermen were still working farther up the Harlem River and commuters on the Harlem and New Rochelle railroad passed in plain view of the Harlem River oyster rakers. Some Westchester and Bronx beds were still in use, notably East Chester Bay, the waters of City Island. There was also oystering along the Bronx coastline until 1889, when the dredging of the Harlem Ship Canal, allowing passage for larger ships, took away the wetlands, the shellfish beds, and the traditional look of that coast.
After the Civil War, Staten Island oyster prices went back down to their prewar level. The response was to produce more oysters. A handful of families had become wealthy on oysters—a kind of Staten Island oyster aristocracy who named streets after themselves and built grand mansions facing the Kill van Kull. The Virginia oysters of Prince’s Bay, now some generations from Virginia, continued to be highly prized, as were the native Staten Island “Sounds,” which competed with Bluepoints and sometimes replaced them when the Long Islanders did not maintain their quality in the European market.
Staten Island oysters bound for Europe, with at times as much as a third of the catch for London alone, would be sent across the water to New Jersey packing plants in Keyport and Perth Amboy. Keyport also did a prosperous business supplying the beach resorts on the Jersey shore. In the late nineteenth century, oysters were the most popular snack on all the New York area beaches, including Coney Island and Rockaway. In 1867, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman had invented a cart for keeping sausages warm so they could be sold on the beach at Coney Island. The sausages grew in popularity after 1875 when he started selling them on a roll as they had done back in Nuremberg. By 1882, the eight
y Frankfurt vendors on Coney Island beach and Feltman’s 1,200-waiter restaurant were giving oysters some competition, but for the ten-cent price of a hotdog, the bather could get a whole plateful of oysters.
In the late nineteenth century, both the technology and the market existed to clean out New York oyster beds in a few energetic seasons. The economics were growing tougher because steam-powered dredges were greatly increasing the harvest. Each time a dredge was hauled across a bed, it hauled up seven to eight bushels of oysters. By 1880, the use of steam power was estimated to have increased the amount of oysters brought to market twelve times from the catch when oyster fleets had been purely sail-powered.
Laws were passed to moderate the natural industriousness of men who earned their living by harvesting huge quantities of a low-priced product. Steam power was now commonplace, but steam-powered dredging was banned in much of New York, and even in the case of dredging from a sail-powered sloop, the size of the dredge was restricted to a maximum of thirty pounds. Queens County barred all dredging except in Oyster Bay and Cow Bay.
So long as tonging rather than dredging was used, it seemed the beds could go on forever. A round of tonging stirred up the bed, exposed new surfaces, and promoted new attachments and a fresh crop. Some argued that dredging would do an even better job of this and that it was a mistake to ban the practice.
But it became clear that cultivation had its own kind of overfishing problem. Because of the Civil War, New Yorkers had abandoned their reliance on Southern seed oysters to plant their beds. Selling tiny seed oysters became a growing business, especially in the Great South Bay. Boats from as far away as Rhode Island and Massachusetts came to the Great South Bay to gather seed for their own beds. The bay was also a major source of seeds for Rockaway and Staten Island beds. In its cheapest form, seed was sold the way it was caught. The tiny oysters were clumped in with rocks, shells, and dead sea life. This sold for twenty-five cents a bushel in the 1880s. But often a skiff would hire boys to sit on deck as the oystermen were tonging and cull through the matter that came up with the oysters, spreading it out on the boards placed across the gunwales. The seed they culled sold for as much as sixty cents a bushel. But starting in the 1870s, seed became increasingly difficult to find in the Great South Bay. By the 1880s, with five hundred sailing vessels coming every year with a basket hoisted up the mast, young oystermen in the Great South Bay had no memory of the days when seed was easy to come by.
Old practices were becoming newly controversial, including the New York custom of “drinking” oysters. After oysters were harvested, rather than taking them directly to market, the oystermen would “float” them in holding tanks in the mouths of freshwater rivers and streams. This made the oysters whiter in color and plumper in appearance, although this plumpness was a bloating that may have made the oysters less flavorful. An article in The New York Times in 1910 called drinking “adulteration.” It argued, “Adulteration of oysters on the half shell, freshly opened, might be thought as difficult as adulteration of unpeeled fruit.” The Times reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been looking into the question because oysters were classified and priced by their size, and an oyster could become bloated into a different price category. The Department of Agriculture argued that four quarts of shucked oysters placed in one quart of water would quickly become five quarts of oysters if the oysters had been drinking fresh water prior to shucking. The consumer would not know that one of those quarts was water.
Surprisingly few consumers, most of them European, complained that the practice also watered down the flavor. But there was another growing issue. The freshwater sources of the New York estuary system where the oysters were drinking were the most polluted waters. Industry dumped waste into rivers. Already by the eighteenth century, Gowanus Bay, where the Dutch had praised foot-long oysters, had been closed to oystering because of raw sewage. By the midnineteenth century, Jamaica Bay’s famous Rockaway beds were closed because of the tons of raw sewage dumped there from nearby Long Island towns. Such contaminated freshwater openings to the sea were exactly where oystermen chose to have their catches drink.
Sewage along with other New York garbage and waste was taken out to sea on scows and dumped. Some of it washed back into the city, even clogging parts of the harbor, and as early as the 1854 oyster panic, many people were denouncing this practice, especially when the waste, including dead animals, washed up in the popular beach resorts in the summertime. A growing belief that the foul smells were poisonous disease-causing gas led to the formation of the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866. In 1870, this was taken over by the New York City Board of Health, which in 1886 built the first chemically treated waste-water facility in the United States on Coney Island. But by 1910, 600 million gallons of untreated sewage were dumped into New York City water every day. When at the beginning of the twentieth century, floating bathhouses opened on the shores of Manhattan every summer for swimming and recreation, sewage could be seen among the swimmers and sometimes children would emerge covered in filth.
Cholera is a disease caused by bacteria, Vibrio cholerae. Although bacteria, the oldest form of life on earth, was first discovered in the seventeenth century, it was not until the late nineteenth century that its role in diseases was understood. Only a few years after the oyster panic, the French chemist Louis Pasteur promoted his theory that diseases were caused by germs. But it was only a theory—referred to as “the germ theory”—until the German bacteriologist Robert Koch started proving the connection. In 1884, after documenting the infection process of numerous other diseases, he demonstrated how Vibrio cholerae caused cholera. In 1885, cholera bacteria were recovered from harbor water during an epidemic in Marseille. The long-suspected connection between oysters and typhoid became clearly established in the 1890s. It was also determined that sewage bred the Salmonella bacillus, which public-health authorities could identify in the water and in oysters and which was the cause of persistent outbreaks of typhoid.
In one decade, the medical view of the world changed. The culprits of urban epidemics switched from poverty, immigration, and immorality to bacteria, sewage, and shellfish. The “germ theory” that had been debated and often rejected in medical schools up until the 1880s became, by 1890, the established scientific thinking.
Though typhoid did not have nearly the mortality rate of cholera, it was a prolonged ailment that sometimes resulted in death. It swept rapidly through urban areas because infected people, especially if involved in handling food, could pass it on. The most famous example was Mary Mallon, Typhoid Mary, who became infected in 1904 while working as a cook in a typhoid-stricken household in Oyster Bay, Long Island. She continued as a cook in numerous households and was apprehended in 1907 while cooking for a Park Avenue home. So began a history of being institutionalized, released, caught cooking, and once again apprehended. She was thought to have been responsible for at least fifty cases of typhoid, three fatal, including a serious outbreak at a women’s hospital.
Public-health officials began to understand that oysters, because they feed by filtering water, are a reflection of the quality of the water in which they live. They can be used to measure pollutants such as DDT and have even been used to measure radiation. At the turn of the century, oysters showed that New York was producing too much sewage to be able to dump it all into the sea without consequences.
London, whose valuable oyster beds were in the estuary of the Thames, had the same problem. In 1896, a British medical inspector, Dr. H. Timbrell Bulstrode, toured the principal oyster beds of England and Wales and reported in detail on the relationship of sewage drains to oyster beds. Scares in prominent oyster beds, such as Whitstable in 1903, seriously diminished the demand for oysters in Britain. France also had scares about infected oysters, and between 1898 and 1901, the demand for oysters in France was cut in half. But while British demand continued to decline, the French, always the more courageous eaters, soon resumed their old ways.
In New Yo
rk, once the typhoid scares began, the practice of drinking oysters was banned by the Pure Food Department in Washington. But the large New Jersey oyster packers fought the decision. The 1905 Christmas edition of the Keyport Weekly, a publication that was a great booster of the local oyster industry, argued:
The oysterman contended that the “floated” oysters were better, kept longer and were more tender than those not thus treated. The discussion led Professor Julius Nelson of Rutgers College, Biologist of the New Jersey State Agricultural Experiment Station and a scientist of the highest standing—himself at first opposed to the oystermen’s contention—to investigate the problem . . . . He made an exhaustive study of the question, and the result was that for once that practical man knew more than the scientist and the oystermen’s contention was upheld in every detail and the Pure Food Department has withdrawn the ban. The freshened oyster is better, cleaner, tenderer, purer, free from sand, etc. and the unfloated article has practically passed from the market. The only possible danger is from oysters floated in polluted waters, and as all such grounds are now under the supervision of both the State and local boards of health such a thing is well nigh an impossibility, especially with a reputable firm.
This was characteristic of the thinking of many people in 1905. They believed that now that the government had learned how to measure pollution, they didn’t have to worry about it anymore. But what those health boards found was that there was almost no unpolluted fresh water available for floating oysters. And so the practice was once again banned, a development cheered by The New York Times. At the opening of the season in 1909, the paper reported that “the sickly bleached color is disappearing from oysters” because the practice of “drinking” had been, at last, stopped.
The Big Oyster Page 22