Brian’s Reviews > The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell > Status Update

NYC 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 16-square-mile zone. In '77, 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.

It is difficult not to ask the question: Are ten million or more people not too many to be living on one estuary?

By 1910, 600 million gallons of untreated sewage were dumped into New York City water every day. When at the beginning of the twentieth century, floating bathhouses opened on the shores of Manhattan every summer for swimming and recreation, sewage could be seen among the swimmers and sometimes children would emerge covered in filth.

As the city grew, the plan for a street grid in Manhattan provided for east–west streets spaced closer together while the few north–south avenues were farther apart because the city planners were certain that the bulk of traffic would be east–west between the two waterfronts, the Hudson and the East River.

In truth nobody really wanted to eat a foot-long oyster. In the nineteenth century, British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray complained that eating an American oyster was “like eating a baby,” which presumably was not an endorsement.

The long path through the entire length of Manhattan used by Indians delivering fur pelts was now officially called “Beaver Path.” But once the path was broadened, people started calling it “Breede Wegh” or “Broadway.”

If the oyster is opened carefully, the diner is eating an animal with a working brain, a stomach, intestines, liver, and a still-beating heart. As for the “liquor,” that watery essence of oyster flavor that all good food writers caution to save, it is mostly oyster blood.

New York is a city that does not plan; it creates situations and then deals with them. Most of its history is one of greedily grabbing beautiful things, destroying them, being outraged about the conditions, tearing them down, then building something else even further from nature’s intention in their place.