Eat the City(66)
“IT is not possible to describe how this bay swarms with fish, both large and small, whales, tunnies and porpoises, whole schools of innumerable other fish, which the eagles and other birds of prey swiftly seize in their talons when the fish come up to the surface,” marveled Jaspar Danckaerts in 1679. He described tasting foot-long oysters, harvested from Brooklyn’s Gowanus, as good as those in Europe. “I had to try some of them raw,” he said. In his day, tuna, perch, sturgeon, striped bass, herring, mackerel, halibut, weakfish, blackfish, stone bream, eel, sheepshead, oysters, and sole, as well as whales, porpoises, otters, and seals all filled the waters of New York Harbor.
The city was a nexus of fish routes, as some fish moved up from ocean to river to spawn, and others swam down from river to ocean. The tidal straits, creeks, kills, narrows, bays, inlets, marshes, reefs, streams, basins, coves, and wide-open ocean of New York City form one of the most intricate and ecologically complex estuaries in the world. “With all the interlacing of waterways hereabouts, we could have had a wonderful national park,” mused one nature lover in 1980, considering the extraordinary confluence of waterways that contributed to more than fifty ecologically distinct areas, including pitch-pine barrens, peatlands, and eelgrass meadows. “Think of the fishing, the boating, the wildlife marshes, the oyster beds, the shad runs, the scallop beds. All that room for marinas. The cool ocean breezes. Those magnificent and smogless sunsets, which sustained an entire Hudson River school of painters.”
Instead, when the Dutch moored their ships in the East River shallows and trudged to shore in their leather boots, they saw in the waterways the ideal infrastructure for commerce. They built homes facing the water, and from the start, they ate of it.
When Europeans arrived, the Lenape people native to New York sold them fish. The Lenape had long fished with spears and milkweed nets and launched tulip-tree canoes off the west side of Manhattan to drop lines with bone or stone hooks into the water. They sun-dried shad and striped bass on tree bark to preserve for the winter, gathered oysters from the shallow waters and dug with the balls of their feet for clams in the soft mud. One of the very earliest ways to make a living in Manhattan was as a fisher and fishmonger.
Within a century, regular fishing fleets were setting out to catch cod, mackerel, and sturgeon—more than a thousand fish at a time. Manhattan farmers sought prime waterfront land so they could fish and trap off their own shores. They cooked shad (whose Latin name, Alosa sapidissima, means “most delicious of herrings”) nailed over an open fire. They called soft-shell clams “pissers” because they squirted water like a boy peeing. The original charter for the Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan includes rights to whales that stranded themselves on the nearby beaches of the Hudson.
By the 1700s, the city huddled by the water was growing north, yet lower Manhattan still had the feel of a waterfront town. African American street vendors trawled the narrow, newly cobblestone streets, calling out, “He-e-e-e-e-e-ere’s your fine Rocka-a-way clams.” The youngest known fisher in town was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Moles Lynn, tavern-keepers: at two and a half years old, he fished from Moor’s Dock with a tiny rod—until September 1773, when he fell into the water and drowned.
For hundreds of years, visitors arriving in the city would be advised to “enjoy the oysters.” In 1800, oyster houses advertised Jamaicas, Rockaways, and Amboys, named for the places they were harvested. Saloons offered all the oysters you could eat for six cents on the “Canal Street Plan,” and there was an oyster and clam stall on nearly every block. In one contest held in Grand Central Station in 1885, the winning shucker opened 2,500 oysters in two hours, twenty-three minutes, and thirty-nine and three-fourths seconds. “All along the East River are places, rude huts, paralytic shanties, where oysters are sold at a penny apiece,” wrote one chronicler. Then as now, everyone had free access to the fruits of the local waters. For the poor, these wild meats were a staple protein. As hungry immigrants began to pour into the city, all around Manhattan, “anyone with a length of string, a hook, a railroad nut for a sinker, and a bit of clam purchased at a fish market could expect to catch a fine dinner,” wrote one fisheries historian. Oysters were a rare instance of rich and poor eating the same food at the same time prepared the same way.
Fishing was a growing industry with ever more efficient technology. Commercial fishers dropped purse seines, circling around a school of fish and pulling the tops of the net together, like a ladies’ purse. They used gill nets, with holes large enough for fish heads but not fish bodies, so they would get stuck and the net could be pulled up full. Like sensible predators, fishermen moved in and out of New York Harbor following their migrating prey. In March, the fleet of southern mackerel seiners set out from New England ports for the waters off North Carolina, to meet and trap the first schools of fish swimming north and deliver them to the marble display counters of the Fulton Fish Market. The first catch would get the highest price of the season. The boats brought the living fish to the city in a wet well, a large wooden fish tank built into the hold. By late April, the schooners would be off of New Jersey, making two or three trips a week to the Manhattan market. When the mackerel were farther north in the summer, the schooners would deliver them to the markets of New England. Overfishing was nothing new; shell records show that even the native people, the Lenape, had used up the largest oysters. What was new was the scale.