TODAY it’s called Liberty Island, because of the Statue of Liberty on it. But it used to be Dutch and surrounded by oyster beds as far as the eye could see. You fly over it in a helicopter and think that, hm, the Great Oyster Island wasn’t that greatly big after all. But it was.
Nearby is Little Oyster Island, which remained so named until it was sold to Mr. Ellis. That alone was large enough to accommodate 12 million immigrants to pass through.
Biologists insist that, when the Dutch first arrived four centuries ago, half of all the world’s oysters lived in and around New York Harbor, and that they were eventually all wolfed down. Some were giant, up to 8 inches long. And because 90 pct of the oyster is its shell, this resulted in improbably large mountains of shell waste.
THERE IS a street in Manhattan, Pearl Street, formerly Paerlstraat, which used to run along the shoreline. Paerl was Dutch for pearl and naming the street so was an expression of hope, which is why Breukelen across the river, now Brooklyn, had and still has just such a Paerlstraat. Unfortunately, the New York oysters didn’t grow pearls, much to the chagrin of many Dutch Americans, who then tossed their trash and their empty shells on the beach and pushed the coastline farther into the sea.
It took two centuries, but the oysters from Great Oyster Island and the rest of the Hudson River Basin have eventually all been eaten. And because there were so many of them, you can still find remnants of oyster shells in and around New York today. There are highways over shell layers, as well as train tracks. There are skyscrapers sitting on top of one or more layers of oyster shells, and so are court buildings, retail stores, and Chinatown’s restaurants. An average oyster dump hill was more than thirty feet tall and three hundred or more feet long and wide.
OF THE BIG oyster island only the heart remains. Back then, Liberty Island’s beach ran much farther into the sea, because of those dump hills and because of the oyster beds that would emerge from the low tides. Now the water has been dredged clean so that the annual 3 million tourists can safely reach the Statue of Liberty by boat from Manhattan.
Anyway, if you wanted to eat oysters in New York more recently, everyone from TripAdvisor to Manhattan Digest used to recommend making a reservation at Chalk Point Kitchen. They knew their history there. Chalk Point used to be called Kalck Hoeck, and chalk is what they turned the huge piles of oyster shells there into. But the restaurant is closed now, for good. History, as are New York’s oysters.
The red line indicates where the shoreline of Manhattan used to be, named for the pearls that never were.
Jan Steen painted in 1660 what was considered a food not only in Amsterdam, but also in New Amsterdam, oysters.
