The Big Oyster (12 page)

Oyster beds are very different from fishing grounds because the oyster permanently attaches itself to the bed. For that reason and because oystering was recognized as valuable, the new New Yorkers were fighting over ownership of underwater land—a notion that the Lenape would have found even more absurd than the concept of fighting over abundant dry land.

In 1715, the colonial government, as a conservation measure, banned oystering in the months without
R
s, May 1 to September 1, because it was the egg-laying season. The measure also reduced harvesting by barring slaves and servants from taking or selling oysters. The law was aimed at New Jersey residents who shared with Staten Island Raritan Bay and Arthur Kill, both rich in natural oyster beds. Nonresidents caught working Staten Island beds had their vessels and equipment seized. In 1719, the colonial assembly of New Jersey retaliated with an act “for the preservation of oysters in the province of New Jersey.” The act closed all New Jersey beds from May 10 until September 1 and also stated “that no Person or persons not residing within this province” shall directly or indirectly “rake, gather up any Oysters or Shells within this Province, and put them on board any Canow, Periauger, Flat, Scow, boat or other vessel” and that any non-resident caught would have his vessel and equipment confiscated. By 1737, Staten Island officials were also becoming concerned about the survival of their beds and they barred oystering for anyone other than Staten Island residents.

In colonial times, such laws depended on local citizens for enforcement. Oystermen caught working beds off season would claim they were harvesting clams, and the local enforcers lacked the expertise to argue the point. This ineffectual system of citizens' arrests on the oyster beds continued into the nineteenth century.

By the mideighteenth century, warnings were already being voiced of the possible destruction of oyster beds in the New York area. New Jersey passed a 1769 law to further contain avaricious neighbors. The practice of raking up oysters simply to burn for lime was banned. One of the reasons behind stricter enforcement was concern that oysters remain a cheap source of food and available means of income for the poor. The 1719 law argued that preserving the oyster beds “will tend to great benefit of the Poor people.” But a 1769 law stated that the 1719 one “hath not been sufficient to preserve the oysters” and that:

   

Practices are made Use of, not provided against by the said act [of 1719], which, if permitted to continue, will in a short Time, destroy the Oysters in the Rivers and Bays of this colony.

   

Jamaica Bay, named not after the Caribbean island but from the Canarsee name Jameco, was rich in oysters, clams, and crabs, especially on the northern side, which is dotted with islands that appear only at low tide. The residents of Rockaway attempted to regulate oystering in the bay as early as 1704, when nonresident oystermen found working the bay were arrested. In July 1763, a proclamation stated:

   

Whereas diverse persons, without any right or license to do so, have of late, with sloops, boats and other craft, presumed to come in to Jamaica Bay and taken, destroyed and carried away quantities of clams, mussels and other fish to the great damage of said town, this is to give warning to all persons who have no right or liberty that they do forbear to commit any such trespass in the bay for the future, otherwise they will be prosecuted at law for the same by Thomas Cornell Jr. and Waters Smith by order of the town.

   

In 1791, it was ruled that anyone taking oysters in Jamaica Bay had to pay the town of Rockaway one shilling for every thousand oysters. The penalty for failing to do so was forty shillings.

Around the New York area, local governments were feeling increasing pressure to bar outsiders, even neighbors, from local beds. Apparently the oystermen who worked the beds could see that even Eden had its limits. While Manhattan above the waterline still had enough spare land to hunt, and walk in the woods, and throw out garbage, ownership of the land under the shallow brackish sea was being contested.

It was not
necessary to leave Manhattan for a trip to the country. A well-known house in rural Manhattan called the Union Flag had a tavern with twenty-two acres of open land, a wharf, and landing. The tavern offered drinking, cockfighting, and gambling, which was illegal. With seventeenth- and eighteenth-century transportation Manhattan was a large island. Danckaerts described Harlem as a village three hours from the city. New Yorkers journeyed up the East River to Turtle Bay. In 1748, a visiting English clergyman, Reverend Burnaby wrote:

   

The amusements are balls and sleighing expeditions in the winter and in summer going in parties upon the water and fishing, or making excursions into the country. There are several houses, pleasantly situated up the East River, near New York, where it is common to have turtle feasts. These happen once or twice a week. Thirty or forty gentlemen or ladies, meet and dine together, drink tea in the afternoon, fish and amuse themselves until evening, and then return home in Italian chaises [the fashionable carriage of the time] a gentleman and a lady in each chaise.

   

For in-town recreation, the common was a place for lawn bowling and cricket. Americans won a famous match against the British in April 1751.

More and more taverns opened. They were not only for drinking but also places of business and politics. In 1766, 282 taverns were operating in New York. By 1773, the number had risen to 396. Drinking was cheap. New York rum had to compete with New England rum called “Kill-devil” that was only twenty-five cents a gallon and cheap young New Jersey applejack called Jersey lightning. Alcoholism was a growing problem. It was sometimes claimed that alcohol was a substitute for the increasingly foul New York drinking water, which came from wells and natural streams until the first pipelines were installed in 1799.

Prostitution remained a New York trade, though Griet Reyniers, said to be Manhattan's first prostitute, married a pirate, that other not-uncommon Manhattan-based trade, and the two had enough money to move to Long Island and become wealthy landowners there. In 1770, reportedly five hundred prostitutes were working in New York, a city of slightly over twenty-one thousand people.

The city was growing, the port was prospering, money was being made. The rich lived in brick houses with a view of the harbor or the rivers and roasted oysters in cozy fireplaces. The poor lived in wooden shacks, near the garbage-strewn pond, the Collect, and ate oysters in basements. A city of pirates, entrepreneurs, and the struggling poor—New York was well on its way to being the city that is known today. And then came a catastrophe.

CHAPTER FIVE

Becoming the World's Oyster

N
o American city suffered more, or gained more, from the
American Revolution. When it was over, New York was a port that could supply a new, vigorous, and growing nation. But during the war it was an occupied city, under hostile military rule, its commercial and social life shut down, its connections to the rest of America cut off, its population dwindled to those who had not wanted or had not managed to escape.

Poet Walt Whitman argued for years that August 27 should be celebrated with pomp equal to July 4. On August 27, 1776, the British began a battle through the fields and farms of Brooklyn. One of Whitman's great-uncles was among the many dead that day, the beginning of a five-day engagement then called the Battle of Long Island, or Nassau Island, as it was usually known in the eighteenth century. But today it is more precisely pinpointed as “the Battle of Brooklyn.” It was the largest battle of the American Revolution.

Looking for a port as a base of operation, the British military chose New York City, which had been their headquarters and home to many British officials until the war broke out in 1775. They unleashed a three-month campaign to take it back and hold it. In the meantime, from the loyal northern colonies, Canada, a military force would take Albany and the upper Hudson. After New York City was secured, the British would control the Hudson and New England would be cut off from the other rebellious colonies.

New York was the town the British called home, the town they liked, where they did not have to follow an austere Puritan frontier existence. There they had urban pleasures and weekends in the country and good taverns and, not least for eighteenth-century Englishmen, good oysters. New York was the only one of the thirteen colonies that had a permanent British military presence during most of the colonial period. They were there to guard the port and to keep an eye on the Iroquois. New York City was their command base—their city. The heads of the British command, General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe, liked America and Americans. Massachusetts had built a statue of their older brother, who had commanded in the Seven Years' War. The Howes were convinced that most New Yorkers were Loyalists and would happily hand over their city.

But apparently they were not completely convinced of this because the force they brought to New York was the largest invasion force ever assembled by Great Britain until the World Wars. This included 420 ships carrying thirty-four thousand soldiers, at a time when the total New York City population was about twenty-four thousand. General George Washington was defeated in five disastrous days. The British then spent the rest of the summer chasing and battering the Continental Army, but failing to encircle and capture them, which would have ended the Revolution. Instead they achieved their initial goal, taking Manhattan and New York Harbor, and settled in for a much longer war.

New York City did have more Loyalists than any of the other rebelling colonies. In fact, the New York delegation chose to abstain on the vote on the Declaration of Independence and did not sign. And before the Howes had arrived, a plot by more than seven hundred New Yorkers, including the mayor, David Mathews, to kidnap Washington and trap the Continental Army on Manhattan was uncovered.

If many New Yorkers were Loyalists, Staten Island oystermen went back and forth. They were not as concerned about the British as they were about the New Jersey oystermen on the opposite shore. When the New Jersey oystermen were Loyalists, they became revolutionaries. But when their New Jersey counterparts took up the revolutionary cause, Staten Islanders were Loyalists. Their war was with New Jersey, not the British. In 1700, the provincial government had tried to resolve the issue by drawing a boundary line through Raritan Bay that gave about half the beds to each side. But the conflict continued and the Revolutionary War provided the means to make it an armed conflict.

In Manhattan, an active minority of revolutionaries rioted, pulled down the statue of George III, and, according to legend, melted the metal into musket balls. They were able to stage enough such events to make the British feel unwelcome. The British responded with both brutality and corruption. Occupied New York became an example of the worst in British rule. New Yorkers anticipated this. In June, when Admiral Richard Howe sailed into New York Harbor and General William Howe landed and encamped a large force on Staten Island, both carrying a conciliatory message to the locals, New Yorkers began to evacuate their occupied city. Many of Manhattan's houses were dark and empty.

Under colonial rule the city had established a fairly effective fire department. The first fire engine was imported from England in 1731, and by 1737, New York had an organized volunteer fire department. In 1740, they were issued new leather helmets designed to let water run down the back or, reversing the headgear, shield the face from the heat of flames. Now the 170-man fire department fell into disarray, and the Royal Navy attempted to replace them as firefighters. A series of fires in a pattern suggesting arson swept through lower Manhattan, destroying 493 houses—about a third of Manhattan. Two years later, in 1778, another fire destroyed more than sixty buildings along the East River. While the city's population dwindled to only twelve thousand, large numbers of blacks, escaped slaves, were flowing in believing that the British, despite their history of slavery and their brutal sugar colonies in the Caribbean, would be more likely to grant their freedom than would the new Americans.

Manhattan remained a charred, half-empty city until the British withdrew in 1783. There was no trade in wheat or pickled oysters or anything else. The harbor was used for mooring the British fleet and for mistreating prisoners of war on prison ships docked off Brooklyn and in the Hudson and East River. Eighty percent of the prisoners held on those ships in New York Harbor died.

New York served the British military as a military, not a commercial, harbor. As it turned out, it was not a particularly good one. A series of sandbars close off the lower harbor between Sandy Hook and Brooklyn. This protects the harbor, and experienced navigators find the trenches between the sandbars. But this means that a large fleet becomes bottled up when it needs to sail out quickly, which kept the great British navy from being available for numerous engagements during the war.

In 1783, after the British surrendered, revolutionary New Yorkers returned to the city, many finding that their homes had been occupied by Loyalists who were now fleeing with the British. The black population also fled, believing that when they reached the Loyalist colony of Nova Scotia they would be set free. But once they arrived in Nova Scotia, few were set free and the British sent most of them back into slavery on sugar plantations in the West Indies, one of the cruelest fates for an African slave.

New Yorkers returned
to a nearly destroyed city. The unused wharves, having seen no commerce, were covered with seaweed and barnacles. Most of Broadway between Wall Street and Bowling Green had been ruined by the two fires. George Washington's thirty-four-year-old son, Philip, was placed in charge of redistributing the abandoned and confiscated Loyalist-held properties. There was little law enforcement, commercial activity, or even sources of revenue. But once the last British ship left in autumn 1783, New Yorkers displayed tremendous excitement about the future of their port and the new republic it could supply. The city's first hero's welcome was to George Washington and the troops of the Continental Army as they entered the city from the Bronx, marched down Manhattan to the Bowery, and paraded through the city to the Battery. The Union Jack was taken down and the new thirteen-starred American flag raised. The burned-out city celebrated for ten days.

There was a daunting list of things to be done. The city needed new buildings, a sewer system, a fire department, laws, courts. It began widening and paving streets, including one, now vanished, called Oyster Pasty Lane. They built a jail and an almshouse, and in 1784, a garish red structure resembling a Chinese pagoda was added between them. This was the gallows, where the convicted were sent for a rapidly lengthening list of capital crimes including treason, murder, rape, forcible detention of women, forgery, counterfeiting, robbing a church, housebreaking if the house was occupied, robbery, arson, and malicious maiming. The gallows was used with regularity. In 1789 alone, ten executions were carried out, five on the same October day. For lesser crimes, a whipping post and stocks were installed nearby.

A process, not entirely planned, of Manhattan increasing its land and narrowing its waterways had begun. Discarded trash would start to fill in around the piers and merchants, rather than cleaning it out, would extend the docks farther out and finish filling in the trash area with landfill until they had added several blocks to lower Manhattan at the expense of the East River, the harbor, and the Hudson. After nearly eight hundred people died in the yellow-fever epidemic of 1798, affluent New Yorkers fled downtown and settled in a newly landfilled area that became known as Greenwich Village.

New York had lost its leading market, including its leading oyster market, because the British barred the new nation from trading with their empire. But there was always the local market, as more and more people settled back in Manhattan. In 1785, John Thurman, a local merchant, wrote a description in many ways familiar to today's New Yorkers:

Many of our new merchants and shopkeepers set up since the war have failed. We have nothing but complaints of bad times . . . . Yet labor is very high and all articles of produce very high. Very small are our exports. There is no ship building, but house building in abundance, and house rent remains high. Law in abundance, the Trespass Act is food for lawyers—yet we say there is no money. Feasting and every kind of extravagance go on—reconcile these things if you can.

New York, which created North America's first bar association, became and has remained a city of lawyers. From 1700 to 1712, the number of lawyers doubled. Among the abundant new laws were several dealing with sanitation. Every Friday between May and December, every home owner was to gather the dirt, garbage, and refuse from around his house and pile it near the gutter before 10
A.M.
, when the city would pick it up. But many did not bother to put their trash out early in the morning.

The city's sewage system consisted of a long line of black slaves carrying pots of sewage on their heads late at night to dump into the rivers, on top of the oyster beds. There were still some open ditches of sewage running to the rivers, as did the canal that had been covered over by the Dutch to build Broadway, leaving the waterway as a sewer underneath it. All of the dozen or so streams and brooks of the island of Manhattan were eventually turned into sewers and covered over. The landfill around the edges of lower Manhattan that expanded the area by more than sixty acres did not have proper drainage. Such waterfront neighborhoods as Water Street and Pearl Street frequently had flooded basements and sewage would back up and flood the yards. Houses had to keep their windows closed to keep out the smell. Finally, in 1796, at the insistence of the city health officer, Dr. Richard Bayley, the city's first underground sewer pipes were laid.

New York officials avoided discussion of these issues in 1789 when the city was in competition with a new District of Columbia to become the permanent capital of the United States. However, a notice in the
Daily Advertizer
on December 19, 1789, called upon New Yorkers to be more civic-minded about their trash disposal:

AWAKE THOU SLEEPER, let us have clean streets in this our peaceful seat of the happiest empire in the universe. That so our national rulers and their supporters may with convenience and decency celebrate a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.