New York was an Oyster Town (and may be again)

Mark Kurlansky's book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell is the perfect beach read if you are at the Jersey Shore (which I am) and you don't want to escape and instead want to ponder just what has happened to our water-- especially the water and estuaries around New York City and New Jersey-- and the creatures that inhabit this water; Kurlansky writes a chronological and comprehensive history of New York City through the lens of the oyster, starting with the Dutch and the Lenape's interaction in New Amsterdam in the 1600's; then detailing Revolutionary Era Manhattan-- "a city of pirates, entrepreneurs, and the struggling poor,"; then Kurlansky focuses on New York in the 19th century, which was the golden age of oyster eating, oyster harvesting, oyster shipping and oyster bars; and finally, he ends with the inevitable: rapacious overharvesting, pollution, sewage, the end of edible oysters around the city and recognition that something needs to be done . . . it gets weird to read the word "oyster" so many times, but New York really was an oyster town-- the shellfish was abundant, delicious, cheap, and cooked in a variety of ways; the rich and the poor both ate oysters in vast quantities, and Kurlansky provides the recipes to prove this; the beds were everywhere: the East River, Jamaica Bay, the Gowanus, the Battery, City Island, Rockaway, way up the Hudson and the Long Island Sound and in Jersey as well, the Raritan Bay, Keyport, Newark Bay, etc . . . the processing plants and markets and barges and boats and harbors and seeding and tonging operations were all big business, fueling "oystermania" in the 1800's; it's hard to imagine, but the waters around New York City were incredibly rich in sea life: blue claw crabs and menhaden and shrimp and anchovies, mackerel, bluefish, enormous sea drum, stripers, sharks and sturgeon . . . and up the Hudson there were also freshwater species such as carp, pike, perch, bass and pickerel . . . and then it all came crashing down; first, it was the sewage and typhoid-- and by 1927 the oyster beds around New York were all considered inoperable, incredibly polluted, dangerous, and disgusting . . . and then things got even worse-- for the next fifty years or so, factories poured industrial waste-- heavy metals, dioxins, DDT, etc-- on top of the sewage sludge and silt that had already decimated the bays, rivers, and estuaries . . . and while the Clean Air and Water Act helped to change things, it will be a long long time before we can eat the oysters from around NYC again; environmental programs have started growing oysters in various locations (though not the Gowanus, it still doesn't have enough oxygen) and hopefully, despite the Trump EPA's plan to roll back standards, there is enough momentum to get oyster populations on the rise-- because even if you can't eat them, they filter the water-- and there has been a return of many fish species (but not the drum, because they eat oysters, or the sharks-- which live out past Sandy Hook and can still smell something wrong with the bay) and after doing all this reading about the state of oysters, I had to eat some, so last night at Mike's Dock, I ordered a dozen Cape May Salts, which I ate on the half-shell-- which means they were still living when I bit into them-- and they were absolutely delicious and typhoid free . . . anyway, there probably won't be edible oysters out of the East River in our lifetime, but if they do get established, they may filter the water enough to change things for our children . . . and the descriptions in the book of the golden age of oysters, when rich and poor, pirates and prostitutes, all congregated in basements to drink beer and consume massive quantities of oysters, is worth the price of admission, whether you're a fan of the bivalve or not.