The Big Oyster (22 page)

Once New York oystermen changed from wild to planted oysters, the big New York oyster became a rarity because the economics were on the side of smaller oysters. Cullens, small low-grade oysters, sold for four or five dollars for a thousand oysters. If left growing in the beds another half year, they became boxes, which sold for seven to eight dollars for a basket containing 150 oysters. It took another eighteen months for a box to grow into an extra, but extras were worth fifteen to twenty dollars for a thousand. For oysters planted in the East River, the greatest profit came from high-quality box oysters. Faster-growing oysters such as Rockaways were most profitable as small cullens, used for stewing or fritters. This is because seed planted in Jamaica Bay reached market size in only four to six months. The same seed would have to grow for two to three years in the East River to reach the same size.

The low price of an oyster had to include the revenue of every stage in the New York oyster business—the oystermen's packinghouses, the oyster barges, the markets, the stands, cellars, and restaurants. The price of an individual oyster was kept low by dealing in enormous volume. Someone who rowed in a skiff and harvested the beds with tongs tried to land ten bushels every day. But if he used a sail-powered sloop, he tried to get almost thirty bushels. A steam dredger had to buy fuel and tried to bring in sixty bushels. If a shucker wanted to earn a living, he had to open thousands of oysters every day. A good shucker would spend no more than three seconds opening an oyster.

Every oyster region had its own tools and techniques for shucking oysters. The Massachusetts “stabber”—later adopted in New Jersey—was inserted in the bill end, while the hinge side was wedged on the bench with the left hand. The abductor muscle was cut first from the deep shell, then from the flat one. This was a fairly easy way to do it, but New Yorkers considered it too time-consuming.

The side knife was used in restaurants because it preserved the shell in good condition for serving. A good shucker could use a side knife quickly. The oyster was held in the left hand, deep shell down and hinge end away. The side knife was slipped between the shells—and this, as anyone who has ever opened oysters knows, is the great trick because it is not always easy to distinguish which fissure on an oyster shell is the real opening. The skilled shucker knew and immediately slipped the blade between the shells and sliced upward, cutting the abductor muscle from the top shell, which was then flipped aside with a turn of the wrist. That same wrist motion went full circle and brought the blade back under to free the oyster from the bottom shell. Done right, this was all accomplished in one fluid motion. Still, it was too much trouble for oysters destined for stews, pickling, or canning.

In New Haven, they had no time for these niceties and employed a hammer and a two-inch wedge of iron on an angle from a block of wood—“a cracking block.” One whack of the hammer and the bill end of the oyster was snapped off, leaving an easy opening for a knife.

New York shuckers employed a number of techniques depending on the place and the purpose, but the most famously New York approach was the New York oyster knife used on the barges. Unlike the Massachusetts stabber, the side knife, or any of the others, the New York knife had no wooden handle but was a single piece of steel with a square end to crack the oysters open and a blade end to cut it from the shell.

In New England, New Jersey, and the South, enormous packing plants hired hundreds of full-time shuckers. But in New York, shucking was largely a seasonal job for longshoremen, deckhands, and other marine workers. It was estimated in 1881 that rarely were there more than 150 shuckers working at any one time in New York City.

Since shuckers worked side by side—three on a barge or hundreds in a packing plant—and the emphasis was always on speed because they were paid by the piece, it became popular for shuckers to amuse themselves with contests. There were many competitions in the New York oyster industry—the fastest run from Staten Island to Chesapeake and back with seed oysters, the fastest from Prince's Bay to Manhattan markets, the fastest to shovel seed overboard, the fastest tonger.

Shucking was an industry-wide competition that grew into regional contests—Manhattan against Long Island, or New Jersey versus New York, or New York versus New England, which was always a popular rivalry, or best in the Northeast, or North versus South. A contest between the two supposedly fastest shuckers on the Atlantic coast took place annually in a different place every year. When Manhattan was hosting it was held in Grand Central Terminal. The contests drew large crowds and heavy betting and were covered by major newspapers.

In 1885, one champion opened 2,300 oysters in two hours eighteen minutes and nineteen and a half seconds. But his competitor opened 2,500 in two hours twenty-three minutes and thirty-nine and three-fourths seconds. Even this, at slightly faster than seventeen oysters a minute, did not come close to the oysters-per-minute record. In the late 1870s, Rhode Island and New York champions went down to Philadelphia to take on the champions from the South. Billy Lowney, who opened oysters in the Robert Pettis shop in Providence, led the North, defeating the Southern champion by opening 100 oysters in three minutes and three seconds, establishing a new world record for 100 oysters. Most people could not pick up and put down 100 oysters in that amount of time. That was 100 oysters without breaking any shells, because in competition only unbroken oysters were counted.

Oyster-opening competitions continued and are still held today. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they were annual events. In 1913, in Keyport, a New Jersey oyster center on Raritan Bay, the national championship was again decided. The competition came down to three men, one from Connecticut, one from Virginia, and one from Keyport. The Connecticut opener used the precision side-knife technique, while the other two used hammer and knife. According to local press they were the fastest openers in the world. The Virginian had recently established a world record of opening forty-one gallons in one day's shift—more than ten thousand oysters.

Such contests were seen as evidence that shuckers' pay, based on enormous volume, was reasonable since they could easily open such quantities. The Keyport contest was covered by
The Oysterman and the Fisherman
magazine, which reported:

The recent oyster opening contest held in Keyport, New Jersey was watched with considerable interest by those who are paying high prices to shuckers. The result of the contest was remarkable. The record time was 20 minutes and 23 seconds, and the number of oysters opened in this length of time was 500. The first prize was $300. The wholesale dealers of New York City pay their shuckers $1.00 for every thousand oysters opened. If we assume that this shucker could keep this record up for a working day of 10 hours, he would earn about $14.00, and if he worked six days a week, he would earn $84.00 per week, and the enormous salary of $336.00 per month. We do not wonder therefore that the New York oyster dealer thinks the cost of shucking is too high.

That was the shucker's workweek—ten hours a day, six days a week—and this was like calculating that if a sprinter can run a hundred yards at a certain speed, why not run a marathon at the same speed? The shucker could perform at a remarkable speed for twenty minutes, but if attempting to work a ten-hour day at that speed, he or she would soon collapse in exhaustion. Most shuckers opened between 500 and 750 oysters in an hour. An exceptionally fast shucker could open 1,000 oysters an hour. In the 1880s, when New York City shuckers were paid ten cents for opening a thousand oysters, most earned about three dollars a day. No modern invention has proved as efficient as a good shucker with an oyster knife.

The floating oyster
markets were the middlemen between the oyster producers and the eleven central food markets located near the docks where products from around the state, the country, and the world were landed. By 1860, more than 12 million oysters were sold in New York markets annually. New York was the oyster-trading center of the world.

Twentieth-century New Yorkers used to go to Paris and marvel at the huge outdoor Les Halles central market until it was torn down in 1969 and replaced by a truckers' market on the southern edge of town. Few remember that New York markets were also lively all-night fairs for the general public. But by the twentieth century, the New York markets had lost their energetic social nature, their all-night restaurants and stands. The last were the Fulton, which was turned into an exclusively wholesale fish market and finally closed in 2005, and one of the oldest, the Washington Market, which was reduced to a produce market that was finally cleared to make way for the World Trade Center in 1968, a year before Paris closed Les Halles. Like the Collect, the markets were removed rather than cleaned up after decades of complaints about their condition. The Manhattan markets were moved to Hunts Point on the northern edge of the city, a site suitable for trucks but not city life. New Yorkers made exactly the same decision as the Parisians made, to move the markets despite their social value, away where the cities would not have to deal with their garbage and truck traffic.

But until the twentieth century, such sprawling, bustling outdoor food markets were so characteristic of New York that, like Les Halles in Paris, no tourist would come to the city without at least once experiencing a New York market. In 1836, James Fenimore Cooper commented that “It is difficult to name fish or fowl, or beast that is not to be obtained in the markets of New York.” This was probably not surprising for a city whose two most famous attributes were commercial prowess and gluttony.

When the British took over in 1664, there were already three markets near the East River. Quickly after independence the city decreed a Market Act that regulated its markets, including forcing them to shut down one day a week on Sunday.

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the six leading markets were well established, four of them close to the piers of the East River where food was received from Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania farmers and fishermen. Once steam-powered ships came into use, the markets began receiving shipments from the South, which meant greens and produce in the winter months.

The Water Street Market was a favored destination of Long Island producers. The Fly Market at Maiden Lane was known for meat and fish. But by the nineteenth century, this market was already old and decrepit and the boats that landed fish had to tie up by a pipe where raw sewage was dumped into the water.

In 1816, the city decided to build a new market, “a spacious market on an enlarged scale and suitable to the taste, opulence and standing of the Metropolis of the Union.” The location, at the East River end of Fulton Street, was by the piers that were originally attractive because farmers could ferry in their goods and not have to pay cartmen to carry the goods through town. But it was the all-night ferry to and from Brooklyn that would make the Fulton Street Market a late-night institution in nineteenth-century New York. Also, many New Yorkers lived within a short walk of the market. The immediate area was filled with decrepit wooden buildings ripe for slum clearance, yet another antique neighborhood neglected until it was so unlivable that the prevailing solution was to level it and put something else there. The city held an architectural contest for the new market's design, which was won by an Irish-born New York architect, James O'Donnell, whose plan the city council immediately began revising. The city did not actually level the neighborhood for the new market until 1821. As always, it was claimed that few people actually lived there and it remains a mystery what happened to them after their neighborhood was torn down. There was some controversy about tearing it down, which was solved by a fortuitous accident. A mysterious fire in a sailors' boardinghouse cleared most of the block.

The building was in a neoclassical style that most Londoners would have found slightly behind the times by the 1820s. A generation after the Revolution, while New Yorkers dogmatically asserted their Americanness and the two nations were still frequently teetering at the brink of war, a tendency remained to imitate the British in many things.

The market had three connected arcades, an E-shaped configuration, each capped by a two-story brick pavilion on the end. One hundred and two butchers rented stalls in the new space—eighty-six in the arcades and sixteen in the far more expensive cellar stalls. There were fruit and vegetable purveyors, fish and fowl mongers, and of course oyster stands, stalls, and cellars. The deputy clerk of the market, Ezra Frost, was given a second-story space in which to live. When the market first opened it was written about as though it were a wonder never before encountered in New York. On opening day a newspaper reported that the market was “ornamented with the handsomest exhibition of beef, mutton, pork, etc., ever presented to the public.”
Harper's
reported, “It's a butcher's store, a fruiterer's stall, an oyster counter, a coffee shop, a poultry yard, a fish monger's estate. It's everything in one.”