Eat the City(64)
All around the city’s edges, Indians, Jamaicans, and Italians eat the smaller fish, the little shiners. Puerto Ricans and Bosnians and Poles go for the bluefish and striped bass, the bigger the better. People will bring a black trash bag to the docks and toss in everything they catch. They will hitch a Styrofoam cooler to a luggage cart to pack with seafood. They will cozy their fish against an ice pack for a long subway ride through the boroughs.
Most are not destitute, but they look to the waters to help them in their struggle to get by. A hundred years ago, a small-time pushcart peddler on the Lower East Side was called a luftmensch, a Yiddish word meaning literally a person who lives off air. The word could be used today, but it would be more apt to say people live off water.
The problem is that these fish, and these waters, contain toxic chemicals. The state Department of Environmental Conservation recommends that most women and children not eat any fish or shellfish from most New York City waters. The guidelines permit men to eat various fish in limited quantities, according to the species—once a week, once a month, or in some cases, never. A study of Hudson River fishers found elevated levels of PCBs and other toxins in their blood. Sustaining oneself by the last wild meat in New York City is no longer advisable.
No one has surveyed precisely how many people subsist on local fish in the city. In Manhattan’s East Harlem, a poll of two hundred women enrolled in the federal Women, Infant and Child program, an assistance program for low-income mothers, found that 10 percent of them eat fish caught in city waters. When the Environmental Protection Agency investigated cumulative exposure to toxins in Brooklyn, officials were shocked to learn that many people in Greenpoint and Williamsburg depended on a diet of East River fish. “This was the first time the U.S. EPA had heard of this potential health hazard,” wrote an academic who studied the project. A community group spent several months one summer polling two hundred Greenpoint and Williamsburg anglers and found that they caught an average of fifty-seven fish a week each: blue crabs, eels, bluefish, and striped bass. The fishers’ family members each ate an average of 9.5 fish per week.
New York is a city on water. Once, seventy miles of streams veined the island of Manhattan and twenty-one ponds pooled in it. A freshwater creek flowed from a marshland under the current offices of the New York Post and met another creek beneath what is now the Marriott Marquis. Another channel flowed from Times Square to the Hudson, near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. The present-day Maiden Lane was a pebbled brook where Dutch girls washed clothes. The marshy Lispenard’s Meadow left soft ground in Soho and northern Tribeca, which for many years made it impossible to construct tall buildings.
Now the old Minetta Brook, which still runs underground north of Washington Square to near Union Square, burbles up into the lobby of an apartment building on Fifth Avenue, which reportedly displays it in clear plastic tubing that looks something like a bong. Other West Village cellars, built on wetlands, flood. Willow trees flourish on the high watertable of the Lower East Side, which was built on landfill. In Flushing, Queens, the planners of the 1939 World’s Fair filled a tidal marsh to make ball fields, which often flooded—and which became, again, wetlands: Around the barbecue area, marshy plants such as spikerushes and water purslane grow in soft, depressed, eternal puddles, and bullfrogs croak.
Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are all islands or parts of islands, and the Bronx is surrounded on three sides by water. New York for hundreds of years was more famous for its oysters than for its tall buildings. The distinctive odor of the Fulton Fish Market at the southern tip of Manhattan—long among the world’s biggest—was often immigrants’ first impression of the city upon disembarking from the ferry from Ellis Island. “When my sister picked me up, I asked her if all of New York smelled like rotten fish,” said one newcomer.
When it comes to fish, the city has a dual history of consumption and destruction. For centuries, the growing and industrializing city suffocated the fish with its wastes even as it continued to eat them. “The bulk of the water in New York Harbor is oily, dirty, and germy,” Joseph Mitchell wrote in 1951. “Men on the mud suckers, the big harbor dredges, like to say that you could bottle it and sell it for poison.”
Since then, the waters have improved. Follow the city’s perimeter, 578 miles of it alongside water. No one keeps official count, but tens of thousands of people likely fish each year. On the right day, if you circle the islands, you will find fishing rods and crab traps dipping off the edge of the city all the way along, seeking out wriggling life from the other side.
ON the edge of Queens facing Manhattan, Canada geese fly up over the East River straight into the sun in a V. From the Gantry Pier in Long Island City, a row of rods and lines of fishing wire block the postcard view of Midtown across the water. John Ruffino unpacks his preferred bait—bunker, otherwise known as menhaden, a bony, oily fish he cuts into pieces large enough to whet the appetite of a good-size striped bass. “You buy as many bunker as you could, you bunk out!” John says, noting the shortage of baitfish. Leaving the table sparkling, covered in sharp, iridescent fish scales, he hooks into the bait. In a single motion, he casts out gracefully and effortlessly far into the water toward Manhattan, as he explains his technique.
“I don’t never fight hard—I let him do the fighting,” John says. “I don’t horse, I don’t pump the fish, I just keep the tip in the air and let him pull, I tighten it, and let him pull,” John says, as though summoning a fish with this talk. “And it feels so good, it really does, ’cause he’s still fresh, he’s got a lot of tempo left, you know what I mean?”