Eat the City(69)
Chemicals and sewage made for a toxic brew for the city’s famed oysters. Specific beds off Staten Island became known for the oysters’ petroleum taste. Cholera outbreaks could often be traced to a particular oyster bed, which would be shut down. People caught typhoid fever, a disease transmitted through exposure to feces, merely from oyster handling.
FISHERMEN were among the first to organize against water pollution. They “have been grumbling considerably recently about the pollution of New York Bay,” wrote the Times in 1899, conceding that fish became scarcer every year. The fishermen decided to propose bills to the legislature and organize people in every assembly district to lobby their representatives to protect fish from chemical pollution and to prevent commercial menhaden fishers from casting nets that indiscriminately captured all kinds of fish for fertilizer. By the next year, the Protective League of Salt Water Fishermen was a lobbying force claiming to represent 100,000 city fishers.
There was so little idea of environmental preservation at the time that eradicating habitats for fish was seen as a sign of progress, a legitimate trade of nature for industry. When a canal was built to provide passage for big ships from the Harlem River to the Hudson, the New York Herald cavalierly wrote, “The life of the bobtail clam, which has had its haunts in the marshy meadows of the Harlem River, is fast drawing to a close,” as its habitat would be destroyed. “No more will the blithesome clam digger, clad in long rubber boots, a short fustian coat, and a red necktie, hie himself to the flats when the tide is out and dig himself a bucketful of this fruit for breakfast.” At the opening of the canal, Mayor William Strong said: “This canal has spoiled my fishing ground, but still, I am willing to do away with another fishing ground upon account of the city of New York.”
By the turn of the century, families swimming on the beaches of Staten Island found themselves covered with “a smelly black substance” that lingered in the water for weeks at a time—the dregs of crude oil. Garbage and waste filled public swimming pools floating in the East and Hudson rivers. Kids would dive off a sewage pipe into the East River and swim a kind of locally practiced breaststroke to swipe away the excrement.
There’s an old maxim: Don’t shit where you eat. Eventually, that wisdom became apparent to New Yorkers. In 1910, the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission set out to assess the impact of dumping six hundred million gallons of untreated human waste into the city’s waters every day. In a well-stocked floating laboratory, with shelves full of beakers and bottles and books, the commission’s scientists took samplings of grease and fecal matter from the water. They analyzed velocities of sewage traveling on tidal currents, “in which V is the velocity of the ascending sewage …” They mapped the locations of hospitals in relation to sewage outlets (unhealthily close by), and charted the incidence of diseases such as typhoid in New York compared to other cities (disturbingly high). They even sent portly, mustachioed men down into the sewers to examine white stalactites of mold.
They found that the bottom of the harbor was deeply harmed, wrote John Waldman, a professor of biology at Queens College who focuses on the ecology of the city’s waters. It was coated with a layer of man-made muck “black in color from sulfide of iron; oxygenless; its fermentation generating carbonic acid and ammonia waste; and putrefying continuously, giving off bubbles of methane gas, so actively in some places ‘that the water takes on the appearance of effervescence accompanied by a sound like rain falling upon the water.’ ” In some places this black substance was an impenetrable ten feet deep. Fields of sewage surrounded Manhattan as far as fifteen miles from shore.
It took a while for assumptions about the superiority of fresh fish to catch up with the realities of pollution. Kids would catch bergalls by the George Washington Bridge, and their grandmothers would make cold sweet-and-sour fish with raisins. People gathered to dig fat, soft clams at low tide at 110th Street. At night near 130th Street, the boats set out to catch the beautiful silver shad with the line of shrinking black circles down its sides that looked like phases of the moon. But the shad catch from the Hudson was about a tenth of the size of a few decades prior—and no one could say exactly why. Men began to notice that they could no longer find the fish they had reeled in as boys.
Mr. Charles H. Townsend, director of the New York City Aquarium, offered the commission his expert testimony: When he kept fish in tanks filled with water pumped in from the harbor, they died. When he kept them in imported ocean water, they lived long lives.
MANY people fishing in the city today don’t eat what they catch. The prospect of contaminated fish usually stops Jane Borock, who casts all up and down western and southern Brooklyn, often near the sewage overflows that attract striped bass. She has seen the brochures warning that a mother’s consumption of local fish can harm a developing fetus. “I want to have kids someday,” she says.
Wearing red, round oversize sunglasses and a white helmet, she wheels down the India Street pier in Brooklyn on her 1969 red Solex motorbike. At the end of the pier, she hops off and reaches for her sturdy fake crocodile purse, overflowing with fishing rods and tangles of line.
“You got bunker?” she says, walking down the pier to another fisher already setting up his gear. There’s a shortage of baitfish, and she wants to cut a deal. “I’ll give you double market rate.”
Jane tries to think like a striped bass. She works in advertising, so she knows how to imagine herself in the position of a creature she wants to lure.