9. The Billion Oyster Project
Let me touch the shells!!!
If you go to grade school in NYC, at some point you will learn on a field trip that huge chunks of our illustrious city are built on landfill. There is a lot of garbage in these depositories and much of it is probably disgusting and unromantic. But the earlier layers have a significant amount of oyster shells ground in with the rest of the muck. Pearl Street, built by the Dutch, was paved with material filled with smashed oyster shell, giving it a shiny sheen. Ellis Island and Liberty Island, podium to the Statue of Liberty, were once Little and Big Oyster Island. In fact, before New York City was nicknamed the Big Apple, it was called the Big Oyster.
Allegedly, oyster reefs grew so big and so far out from what is now primarily industrial waterfront, you could walk across the river on them. Oysters were as big as dinner plates. Huge bags of them sold for pennies, and there were actually attempts to limit harvests in the early 1700s to “protect food for the poor.” The oyster is now an elite snack, served in state alongside flutes of champagne.
What happened to this plenty is what has happened to most natural resources since this country was colonized—the oysters were overfished, raw sewage was dumped in the river until the 1970s, and efforts to protect the wave breaking natural protection of oyster reefs dissipated. Until Hurricane Sandy, a “natural disaster” that could have been much less severe if we’d had these creatures building walls with their bodies for us, as they once did so freely. The Billion Oyster Project was founded in 2014, partially in response to the destruction of Sandy, and their goal is in the name. Their plan is to put a billion oysters back into NYC harbours, hoping those they grow will invite wild oysters into their reefs, making a significant change to the water quality of our five boroughs. Not only are oysters natural protection against erosion and rising sea levels, they also filter the shit out of the water. Literally. A single adult oyster can filter 50 gallons of water in a day.
Ten years later, BOP claims they’ve put 122 million oysters in the water. They have stations all over, but one of their main locations is on Governors Island, where mountains of oyster shells accumulate from restaurant donations. This is where I went after taking the ferry from the Battery Maritime Building in lower Manhattan, stepping off the boat with a crowd of volunteers heading to a dozen other places in the area. It seemed like a ton of people at first, but soon I was walking alone down the service road alongside the Buttermilk Channel, the wakes from passing boats splashing against its edge.
Did you want some more over-generalized New York history? Good, because it’s coming: A lot has happened on Governors Island even though it’s only about 172 acres across (many of which are landfill!). The Lenape called it Pagganck, or Nut Island, because it was full of chestnut, hickory, and oak trees and it’s believed it was mostly used for foraging and hunting. They also harvested oysters, of course, raking them up to wrap in seaweed and cook on the fire. Governors Island is the first place the colonizers of “New Netherland” officially disembarked, and is thus recognised as the “birthplace of the state” by our Senate and Assembly. The anglicised version of the Dutch name was used until the late 18th century, Nutten Island. Around then, it became primarily associated with British colonial governors and was reserved exclusively for their use. It wasn’t until the Revolutionary War that it became a military outpost and existed as one in some form or another before being taken over by the Coast Guard in the 1960s. In the 1990s, they left, and Governors Island’s fate hung in the balance. At one point, Rudy Giuliani was pushing to have a casino or prison built there. This was ultimately prevented in complicated contractual fashion, handing over a portion of the island to the National Parks Service and the rest to various trusts, with deed restrictions that prevent long-term development, particularly of casinos.
There is plenty to do on the island now, in 2023, but it still has a haunted quality. Empty barracks, overgrown roads, long stretches of silent streets that look like they were lifted out of a New England town for sterile display. There is a lot of public art and landscaped trees, playgrounds, and red hammocks hung in groves, gradually unraveling. Civilians can’t drive their cars over on the ferries, so most people ride bikes or walk across it. Behind a chain link fence is BOP. It is comprised of oyster shells, a circle of lawn chairs, and assorted equipment used to build the containers that hold the old shells as they become anchors for the next generation. It was a small group that day, much smaller than the 15 volunteer spots available for sign up. A lot of people didn’t show, and one person even snuck away about twenty minutes after we all got to work.
I had some sympathy for him. I think I imagined giving oyster shells a little spa day, because the event is described as “shell cleaning.” What they actually needed that day was to move a bunch of dusty crap into a truck and then out of a truck into a yellow wood house a twenty minute walk away.
This is the job of a volunteer—whatever they need you to do, you do. It was still a rough transition for the new participants, including an older couple with their mid-thirties son having a family day, a guy who brought his own bike, a young woman in a yellow sweater, and myself, who had been looking forward to rolling in the shells, pretending to be a mermaid. The usual volunteer coordinator was out and the two guys in charge were more on the fabrication end of things from what they said. Things were haphazard.
A very dark side of my personality is that I am bossy. I feel an unbearable itch to organize groups efficiently. This shadow self was soon roaring in my head as I watched people carry items one at a time over yards of ground without making eye contact. I think I made it 45 minutes before suggesting partnering up so we could carry the light yet unwieldy items faster. This was not well received, but the bossy monster inside me only got stronger from feeding it. At the house, I insisted we form a fire chain to move a huge tower of styrofoam boards inside rather than shove in and out past each other one at a time. The other volunteers glimpsed the true twisted visage of my inner controlling beast through the mask that is my face and they lined up to placate her.
Then it was lunch. I ate a really good farro while sitting in a hammock and stared up at the sky afterwards, delightfully exhausted.
Baby oysters are called spat, and they need old shells to hold onto. They can attach to most hard surfaces, actually, but reefs are built on the shoulders of their ancestors. Ancestrally, the only place I feel any connection to is New York, though my family hasn’t been in the U.S. that long and I don’t even think of my biological grandparents as ancestors. If you’d ever met them, you would understand why. It was their parents who first came here from Europe, to the East Village and uptown by Saint John the Divine, producing children who would one day meet at a funeral and get married. On the other side of my family tree there are carnies.
The closest I get to that feeling of connection to a place or a people is when I am standing along the NYC shoreline. The East River, Jamaica Bay, Fort Tilden, Pier 6, wherever you can get close to the water. It’s so gray and dark green, muddy, floating along pieces of plastic and scraps of wood and chemical bubbles. I love the marshes, with their reeds rustling in the wind, and I love how the air is damp all year round and when the clouds drift across the setting sun and split the gold bands of light into streams that touch down all across the estuary. I love the stink of fish and bones gathering on the shore in rippled lines of algae. I love the pragmatic sand pipers and the mean, prideful seagulls. And I love how it will all go on long after I am gone, swirling in and out on the inhale and exhale of the tides. Underneath will be the oysters, a billion of them.
When we returned from lunch, we got to finally mess around with the shell piles, testing out ways to sort them by size to set aside the best grit for a new oyster cement mix. I’m not even going to get into how crazy I was about that. I did find a lost oyster fork during the sorting and took it home.
And then a week or so later, I went to Red Hook to do another BOP event that was much easier on my back, helping to measure the size of new oysters in small cages hung from the pier, data needed for ongoing permits. These are not oysters you should ever, ever eat, but they are so beautiful. In the cages with them were a few random fish and crabs and one tiny shrimp.
Life attracting life in a big muddy pile. Perfect.
A little bit more about Pagganck, and you can read about the American Indian Community House, which has a space at House #15 on the island here.
When I was reading about the cheap oysters, I thought it was so interesting that there used to be laws protecting free or affordable food for the poor. It made me think of the viral discussion of ‘botanical sexism’ that pops up every year around allergy season.
I also feel very connected to New York whenever I watch this video. How about you?