The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  La aurora de Nueva York tiene

  cuatro columnas de cieno

  y un huracán de negras palomas

  que chapotean las aguas podridas

  (Dawn in New York has four columns of mud and a hurricane of black doves wet from the stagnant water.)

  —FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,

  Poeta en Nueva York, 1929–30

  It 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.

  In defiling the Hudson, industry had befouled a relatively small river of 315 miles in length, but it also happened to be one of the most treasured spots in North America. The river is home to more than two hundred fish species—a stunning assortment of both fresh- and saltwater fish, like an aquarium that displays the wildlife of several lakes, a river, and the ocean in the same tank. Among the residents of the Hudson River are largemouth bass, herring, carp, white perch, yellow perch, menhaden, shiners, darters, sunfish, tomcod, and even some subtropical fish such as the mullet and the jack crevalle, which are more typical of Florida than of the Northeast. The Caribbean needlefish and pompano as well as mangrove snapper have been found in the lower Hudson. The lower half of the Hudson is a tidal estuary where typical river species such as trout and pike swim past ocean species including sea horses, dolphins, bluefish, shark, and an occasional intrepid whale. Two species of sturgeon that are classified endangered, striped bass and shad, despite man’s abuse, have stubbornly continued to return each spring through the Narrows and up the Hudson to spawn a new generation of seagoing fish in the river’s fresh waters. Their numbers were critically reduced in the 1970s and eighties, but the populations have been increasing significantly. These three fish have been not only industries but part of New York lore and culture.

  The Hudson River and the waterways at its mouth have evoked passion in many who lived around it. In the nineteenth century, the steep wooded banks of the valley with its softly refracted light fostered one of the most important schools of American painting. And while it is always an inexact science to locate the birthplace of a political movement, an argument can be made—and New York environmentalists do not hesitate to make it—that the American environmental movement began with the urge to save the Hudson.

  Many of the first voices of American environmentalism, including Teddy Roosevelt, spent time by this river that had so astounded Henry Hudson. By the 1890s, there were movements to save upstate forests from lumbermen and in 1901 to save some of the Hudson’s most spectacular scenery from stone quarries.

  In 1963, Consolidated Edison announced its intention to blast a six-million-gallon reservoir at Storm King Mountain to build a power plant. This mountain, about fifty miles north of New York City, was celebrated for its beauty and was a favorite subject of the painters of the Hudson River School. Con Edison’s logic was simple: New York needed the electricity. Their slogan was “Build we must.” This was the same logic that had led to the destruction of so much of New York in the past two centuries, including the oyster beds. Black smoke in the sky, sewage in the water, it had all been accepted as necessary. But in the mid-1960s, many from the Hudson Valley, from New York City, from all over the country, were determined not to let Con Ed deface one of the most celebrated sights along the Hudson. National attention was focused on the fight. Con Ed stockholders sent dividend checks to Scenic Hudson, an organization trying to stop the project. It took years, but in the end the environmentalists won.

  Encouraged by their victory, environmental groups took on some of the country’s largest utility companies, oil companies, industries, town halls, city halls, federal agencies. In 1971, Anaconda Wire and Cable Company, which had been dumping metals, oil, and solvents into the Hudson, was charged by the U.S. attorney with one hundred counts of violating the Refuse Act of 1899. The message was that the courts were going to enforce the law. The action had been started by a complaint from Fred Danback, a janitor who grew up in the Hudson Valley and was disturbed by what his employer was doing to the river. Anaconda paid a then-record fine of $200,000.

  An old legal principle was being revived. The law had long recognized that government controls should prevent nuisances to the public well-being. Anaconda and many other companies were stopped from dumping in the Hudson, the Raritan, and the rest of the estuary system under the same legal principle applied in 1703 when the New York provincial government prohibited the burning of oyster shells within the city limits because of the smoke.

  Another legal principle available to environmentalists was the concept that the public has a right to fish. This principle had been established over access to natural oyster beds, which both New York and New Jersey courts recognized as a public right for residents. A company that pollutes shellfish beds and poisons fish populations is, according to this legal argument, impeding the long-recognized right of residents to fish their wild waters.

  In the 1970s, some forty acts of Congress were passed for the protection of the environment. Among the most crucial for the waters of New York was the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave a deadline of 1985 for all bodies of water in the United States to be swimmable and fishable.

  In the 1980s, the city proposed to do what it had been doing ever since Dutch times, creating more Manhattan real estate by filling in the coastal waters. In this case, it was a highway called Westway that was to cut into the Hudson River bed. The public outcry against construction at the expense of the Hudson River was so forceful and determined that the project was stopped. New Yorkers had changed. They had come to care about their waterways and the estuary in which they lived.

  Bluefish are back, the striper are plentiful, and the sharks off of Sandy Hook are waiting for the water to get clean enough for their return. Sharks hunt by a keen sense of smell, and the harbor still does not smell quite right to them. But the Hudson is rich in fish, and for all its continuing faults, especially PCBs, it
is now considered one of the healthier estuaries in the North Atlantic. Today, all of the Hudson River and almost all of the waters of New York Harbor are swimmable and most are fishable, as the Clean Water Act mandated, but the fish that are caught are not all edible. Health authorities do not recommend eating most New York Harbor fish, though some people do, with a great deal of the fish consumed by poor people who are probably eating poisoned food. Shad is an exception, because it spends its time in the Hudson so obsessed with sex that it does not eat. This is true of sturgeon also, but it is still too scarce to eat. The striped bass is plentiful but dangerously loaded with chemicals because it likes to eat after sex.

  Environmentalists are in constant battles with the port of New York, which tries to give access to ever larger vessels by dredging the harbor deeper. It is dangerous to do anything that stirs up the harbor floor and its centuries of pollution.

  In 1993, a study of the presence of toxins in New York City fish showed the worst to be the PCB-laden eels of the Newtown Creek. As for the Gowanus Canal, which empties onto Jasper Danckaerts’s favorite oyster bed, it may not bubble up as it did in Joseph Mitchell’s time, but it still does not have enough oxygen for fish or oyster beds. When oysters were left in the canal as an experiment to see if they would spawn, they not only died within two weeks but their shells were partially eaten away by acidic compounds in the water.

  A careful examination of many historic oyster-bed sites, such as those in Jamaica Bay, shows an absence of life, though the beds contain empty shells of impressive size. But there are still oysters in the East River, Arthur Kill, and other spots in New York Harbor. Miraculously, a few were recently found growing in the Newtown Creek. They can be seen between the rocks at the seawall of the Battery in lower Manhattan. In 1986, a group called the River Project, wishing to both monitor and teach about the state of water quality in the estuary, established headquarters on a pier in the TriBeCa section of lower Manhattan. They found a few oysters living under the pier and have found more every year since.