The Big Oyster (34 page)

In defiling the Hudson,
industry had befouled a relatively small river of 315 miles in length, but it also happened to be one of the most treasured spots in North America. The river is home to more than two hundred fish species—a stunning assortment of both fresh- and saltwater fish, like an aquarium that displays the wildlife of several lakes, a river, and the ocean in the same tank. Among the residents of the Hudson River are largemouth bass, herring, carp, white perch, yellow perch, menhaden, shiners, darters, sunfish, tomcod, and even some subtropical fish such as the mullet and the jack crevalle, which are more typical of Florida than of the Northeast. The Caribbean needlefish and pompano as well as mangrove snapper have been found in the lower Hudson. The lower half of the Hudson is a tidal estuary where typical river species such as trout and pike swim past ocean species including sea horses, dolphins, bluefish, shark, and an occasional intrepid whale. Two species of sturgeon that are classified endangered, striped bass and shad, despite man's abuse, have stubbornly continued to return each spring through the Narrows and up the Hudson to spawn a new generation of seagoing fish in the river's fresh waters. Their numbers were critically reduced in the 1970s and eighties, but the populations have been increasing significantly. These three fish have been not only industries but part of New York lore and culture.

The Hudson River and the waterways at its mouth have evoked passion in many who lived around it. In the nineteenth century, the steep wooded banks of the valley with its softly refracted light fostered one of the most important schools of American painting. And while it is always an inexact science to locate the birthplace of a political movement, an argument can be made—and New York environmentalists do not hesitate to make it—that the American environmental movement began with the urge to save the Hudson.

Many of the first voices of American environmentalism, including Teddy Roosevelt, spent time by this river that had so astounded Henry Hudson. By the 1890s, there were movements to save upstate forests from lumbermen and in 1901 to save some of the Hudson's most spectacular scenery from stone quarries.

In 1963, Consolidated Edison announced its intention to blast a six-million-gallon reservoir at Storm King Mountain to build a power plant. This mountain, about fifty miles north of New York City, was celebrated for its beauty and was a favorite subject of the painters of the Hudson River School. Con Edison's logic was simple: New York needed the electricity. Their slogan was “Build we must.” This was the same logic that had led to the destruction of so much of New York in the past two centuries, including the oyster beds. Black smoke in the sky, sewage in the water, it had all been accepted as necessary. But in the mid-1960s, many from the Hudson Valley, from New York City, from all over the country, were determined not to let Con Ed deface one of the most celebrated sights along the Hudson. National attention was focused on the fight. Con Ed stockholders sent dividend checks to Scenic Hudson, an organization trying to stop the project. It took years, but in the end the environmentalists won.

Encouraged by their victory, environmental groups took on some of the country's largest utility companies, oil companies, industries, town halls, city halls, federal agencies. In 1971, Anaconda Wire and Cable Company, which had been dumping metals, oil, and solvents into the Hudson, was charged by the U.S. attorney with one hundred counts of violating the Refuse Act of 1899. The message was that the courts were going to enforce the law. The action had been started by a complaint from Fred Danback, a janitor who grew up in the Hudson Valley and was disturbed by what his employer was doing to the river. Anaconda paid a then-record fine of $200,000.

An old legal principle was being revived. The law had long recognized that government controls should prevent nuisances to the public well-being. Anaconda and many other companies were stopped from dumping in the Hudson, the Raritan, and the rest of the estuary system under the same legal principle applied in 1703 when the New York provincial government prohibited the burning of oyster shells within the city limits because of the smoke.

Another legal principle available to environmentalists was the concept that the public has a right to fish. This principle had been established over access to natural oyster beds, which both New York and New Jersey courts recognized as a public right for residents. A company that pollutes shellfish beds and poisons fish populations is, according to this legal argument, impeding the long-recognized right of residents to fish their wild waters.

In the 1970s, some forty acts of Congress were passed for the protection of the environment. Among the most crucial for the waters of New York was the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave a deadline of 1985 for all bodies of water in the United States to be swimmable and fishable.

In the 1980s, the city proposed to do what it had been doing ever since Dutch times, creating more Manhattan real estate by filling in the coastal waters. In this case, it was a highway called Westway that was to cut into the Hudson River bed. The public outcry against construction at the expense of the Hudson River was so forceful and determined that the project was stopped. New Yorkers had changed. They had come to care about their waterways and the estuary in which they lived.

Bluefish are back,
the striper are plentiful, and the sharks off of Sandy Hook are waiting for the water to get clean enough for their return. Sharks hunt by a keen sense of smell, and the harbor still does not smell quite right to them. But the Hudson is rich in fish, and for all its continuing faults, especially PCBs, it is now considered one of the healthier estuaries in the North Atlantic. Today, all of the Hudson River and almost all of the waters of New York Harbor are swimmable and most are fishable, as the Clean Water Act mandated, but the fish that are caught are not all edible. Health authorities do not recommend eating most New York Harbor fish, though some people do, with a great deal of the fish consumed by poor people who are probably eating poisoned food. Shad is an exception, because it spends its time in the Hudson so obsessed with sex that it does not eat. This is true of sturgeon also, but it is still too scarce to eat. The striped bass is plentiful but dangerously loaded with chemicals because it likes to eat after sex.

Environmentalists are in constant battles with the port of New York, which tries to give access to ever larger vessels by dredging the harbor deeper. It is dangerous to do anything that stirs up the harbor floor and its centuries of pollution.

In 1993, a study of the presence of toxins in New York City fish showed the worst to be the PCB-laden eels of the Newtown Creek. As for the Gowanus Canal, which empties onto Jasper Danckaerts's favorite oyster bed, it may not bubble up as it did in Joseph Mitchell's time, but it still does not have enough oxygen for fish or oyster beds. When oysters were left in the canal as an experiment to see if they would spawn, they not only died within two weeks but their shells were partially eaten away by acidic compounds in the water.

A careful examination of many historic oyster-bed sites, such as those in Jamaica Bay, shows an absence of life, though the beds contain empty shells of impressive size. But there are still oysters in the East River, Arthur Kill, and other spots in New York Harbor. Miraculously, a few were recently found growing in the Newtown Creek. They can be seen between the rocks at the seawall of the Battery in lower Manhattan. In 1986, a group called the River Project, wishing to both monitor and teach about the state of water quality in the estuary, established headquarters on a pier in the TriBeCa section of lower Manhattan. They found a few oysters living under the pier and have found more every year since.

The waters have been getting measurably cleaner and the levels of contamination in fish greatly reduced. Even the Gowanus Canal got a flushing system that made the water clear enough for fish to return.

William Brooks's warning from the nineteenth century is almost forgotten, that the water system that loses its oysters loses its self-cleaning system. A healthy oyster population filters and cleans bay water, makes it clearer, and lets light penetrate so that nutrients and habitats will grow. Cathy Drew, the executive director of the River Project, said, “We project that if the oysters were here in the numbers they used to be, they would clear the water in the harbor in a few days.”

Since more and more oysters are slowly turning up, they might conceivably someday cover most of the estuary's shorelines again. But the harbor is still a long way from that quantity of oysters. In 1999, an artificial oyster reef made of shells was placed at an old historic oyster site, just south of Liberty Island. Several other shell oyster reefs have also been started and oysters do grow on them. Environmentalists have been recruiting volunteers to “oyster garden,” that is, to grow a few oysters on private piers in various locations around the harbor and then donate these oysters to the oyster reefs. But the organizers, a group called Baykeeper, cautions that these oysters are for building up the reefs only and that there might be serious health risks for anyone who actually ate them. They state with optimistic bravado their goal that “Oysters will thrive from Sandy Hook to the Tappan Zee, and again be served on New York City restaurant tables.”

Cathy Drew said, “In our lifetime, there's no hope we could eat them, because the water contains heavy metal. But we want them back to clean the water and to enrich the food web, which would attract other animals and birds to the area.” Oysters filter the water of organic waste but can do nothing about heavy metals and PCBs.

Jonathan Swift famously
commented on the courage of the unknown original gourmet who first popped a raw oyster into his or her mouth. It is hard to explain to those who don't do it by what strange impulse humans take these primitive creatures with their tiny hearts pounding and slide them down their throats. It certainly has been something New Yorkers did with passion. The best explanation is that a fresh oyster from a clean sea fills the palate with the taste of all the excitement and beauty—the essence—of the ocean. If the water is not pure, that, too, can be tasted in the oyster. So if someday New Yorkers can once again wander into their estuary, pluck a bivalve, and taste the estuary of the Hudson in all the “freshness and sweetness” that was once there, the cataclysm humans have unleashed on New York will have been at last undone. But that day is far off.