The Big Oyster (21 page)

To rise early in the morning, to get breakfast, to go down to the counting house of the firm, to open and read letters—to go out and do some business, either at the Custom house, bank or elsewhere, until twelve, then to take lunch and a glass of wine at Delmonico's; or a few raw oysters at Downing's, to sign checks . . .

Downing's was also a popular spot for politicians. Like other oyster cellars, it was marked by a red balloon over dank sidewalk steps, but the interior of Downing's eschewed the seedy, vulgar look of the oyster cellars farther uptown and was decorated with mirrored arcades, damask curtains, gilded carvings, sparkling chandeliers, and plush carpeting.

Downing made oyster cellars respectable, at least his, which was a family restaurant where a man could bring his wife. Downing's was the one oyster cellar that respectable women could go to, provided they were accompanied by their husbands. Prostitutes were the only unescorted women ever seen in restaurants, and only in restaurants that allowed prostitution. One oyster cellar came to terms with the alleged moral ambiguities of leaving women alone with oysters by founding a women-only oyster cellar, the Ladies Oyster Shop, a forerunner of the Ladies' Fourteenth Street Oyster House in the 1880s, on 4 East Fourteenth Street just off Union Square. It reflected a growing movement. A Ladies' Bowling Alley was also opened.

In 1835, Downing expanded, renting the basements of the two neighboring buildings. Numbers 5 and 7 Broad Street held the basement restaurant and Number 3 became an oyster storage cellar with running salt water. Though he now raked in too much money to be raking oysters, Downing was known to prowl the harbor in the dark of night looking for the best deals on the best oysters. He would sometimes rent a skiff, row out in the harbor to intercept an incoming sloop or schooner, board her, and buy the best of the catch. Then he would row back to the market, which was an auction, and bid on the vessel's remaining oysters, which he had no intention of buying. When the vessel reached market the price for his leftover catch would already be high. The oyster captains liked Downing, and when they came to his cellar he would make sure that they were treated as well as the leading politicians and businessmen.

Downing's offered a wide variety of oyster dishes, but the standbys were raw, fried, and stewed. His son George described steamed oysters at Downing's:

Ladies and gentlemen with towels in hand, and an English oyster knife made for the purpose, would open their own oysters, drop into the burning hot concaved shell a lump of sweet butter and other seasoning and partake of a treat. Yes, there was a taste imparted by the saline and lime substance in which the juice of the oyster reached boiling heat that made it a delicate morsel.

Food writers always emphasized that smaller oysters could be used for stewing, fritters, or pies, but frying was to be done with large oysters. This is an excellent recipe for frying from the time of Downing's that most health-conscious people today will miss out on.

   
Fried Oysters

Take large oysters from their own liquor into a thickly folded napkin to dry them off; then make a tablespoonful of lard or beef fat hot, in a thick bottomed frying pan, add to it a half salt-spoonful of salt; dip each oyster in wheat flour, or cracker rolled fine, until it will take up no more, then lay them in the pan, hold it over a gentle fire until one side is a delicate brown; turn the other by sliding a fork under it; five minutes will fry them after they are in the pan. Oysters may be fried in butter but it is not so good; lard and butter half and half is very nice for frying. Some persons like a very little of the oyster liquor poured in the pan after the oysters are done, let it boil up, then put it in the dish with the oysters; when wanted for breakfast this should be done.

—MRS. T. J. CROWEN,
The American System of Cookery,
1864

Oyster stew is a very old concept that seems to have changed slightly with each generation. In the heyday of Downing's, the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which many food historians consider to be the best age of American cuisine, Eliza Leslie, a Philadelphian, was recognized throughout the still-young country as the most reliable authority. She made a batter with eggs for frying oysters, which might be better than Mrs. Crowen's later recipe, but Miss Leslie fried in butter, which Mrs. Crowen justly criticized. Butter cannot be heated to a high enough temperature for true frying. But then again, it always tastes good. This is Miss Leslie's recipe for stewed oysters. Her admonishment against flour-thickening refers to a horrible practice of the early nineteenth century in many places, including New York.

Put the oysters into a sieve, and set it on a pan to drain the liquor from them. Then cut off the hard part, and put the oysters into a stew pan with some whole pepper, a few blades of mace and some grated nutmeg. Add a small piece of butter rolled in flour. Then pour over them about half the liquor, or a little more. Set the pan on hot coals, and simmer them gently about five minutes. Try one, and if it tastes raw cook them a little longer. Make some thin slices of toast, having cut off the crust. Butter the toast and lay it in the bottom of a deep dish. Put the oysters upon it with the liquor in which they were stewed.

The liquor of oysters should never be thickened by stirring in flour. It spoils the taste, and gives them a sodden and disagreeable appearance, and is no longer practiced by good cooks. A little cream is a fine improvement to stewed oysters.

—ELIZA LESLIE,
Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery,
1851

Twentieth-century
New Yorker
writer Joseph Mitchell, who interviewed many oystermen over stew, observed: “It isn't easy to carry on a conversation while eating oyster stew,” which would have been useful advice for those who arranged amorous trysts in New York's oyster cellars.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Making Your Own Bed

B
y 1842, about $6 million worth of oysters were being
sold every year to restaurants, fish stores, and street vendors in New York City. Most of these oysters entered the Manhattan market from barges tied up on either the Hudson or East River. These barges were wholesale houses, storage bins, and packinghouses. Typically an oyster barge was a two-story wooden vessel with a curved deck for drainage. On one end, oystermen would tie up their boots and unload, while on the other, pedestrians and wagons from the street would pull up to buy oysters.

The oystermen could not afford to purchase waterfront property for an oyster market, but as early as 1805, oyster sloops started tying up at Coenties Slip, on the East River, just above Broad Street. These sloops served as oyster depots where the catch could be culled, sorted, packaged, and sold. Coenties Slip was a commercially choice spot, close to where the mouth of the East River met the harbor. As the port of New York grew, the oystermen were under considerable pressure to cede the spot to larger commercial interests. Finally, in 1845, the oyster boats moved to Catherine Slip, farther up the East River and close to the Catherine Market, or to Vie or Bear docks on the Hudson near the Washington Market. Because sloops did not have enough deck space for preparing oysters and lacked cabin space for conducting business, they were gradually replaced by canal barges.

By midcentury, oyster dealers were having special barges built, sometimes called arks or scows. The first had small decks, only twelve feet by thirty feet. By the 1880s, at least thirty barges were tied up along the Manhattan waterfront, and they had become two-story structures up to seventy-five feet long and twenty-four feet wide. They would be tied up together in a row, fixed to the waterfront by a gangplank the width of the barge, so that they looked like a row of two-story shopfronts except that they bobbed up and down in the current.

This row constituted a floating wholesale oyster market, with shuckers and cullers and barrelers working on deck and deals being negotiated upstairs. They were often painted pink, though yellow and green were also common. They often had ornate overhanging roofs and balconies. Across the top, in embellished nineteenth-century lettering, would be painted the name of the company. J. & J. W. Ellsworth, Fraser, Houseman, Silesby, and Still were all leading New York oyster companies. The 1840s and fifties, when the oyster barge developed, coincided with the emergence of large oyster companies in New York. Each barge flew a large American flag over the sign. The merchants decorated their barges with bunting, pennants, and other ornaments for the opening of oyster season in September and sometimes for national holidays.

A midnineteenth century wholesale ad showing oyster barges tied up in the East River.
COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The upper-floor office was fairly elegant, with an ornate oak desk and leather chairs. Also on this floor was the storeroom where oysters were kept in cedar tubs and beside them oak bushel baskets and barrels. On the lower deck, seated in a row on three-legged stools, sat shuckers, usually tough, burly men. In front of them the deck was covered with oysters, with more lying in seawater in the hold below. The hold was deep, and so well designed that as long as the hatches were closed, the oysters would stay cool in summer and could not freeze in the coldest winter. An oyster barge was usually designed to hold about seven hundred bushels at a time. A bushel averaged about 250 or 300 oysters, but a basket held only 150 extras and could carry 15,000 seed oysters. At the peak of the oyster industry in the late nineteenth century, at any moment at least six million oysters were on barges tied up at the waterfront.

Wagoneers would lead their teams onto the sloping gangplanks and position them for loading. While retail trade was going out the gangplank, wholesale trade was coming in the rear from the masted sloops that docked behind the barges. Sure-footed strongmen called carriers hoisted heavy baskets of oysters on their shoulders, walking a narrow plank from sloop to scow, the board bowing under the weight of their load as they walked like practiced tightrope artists across the bouncing plank.

Between twenty-five and forty oyster carriers worked on each river, and their job was exclusively to carry oysters, earning ten cents for every thousand toted. A thousand oysters was considered to be seven small and four large baskets. A successful carrier was said to earn thirty dollars, a respectable salary at the time, but to earn the thirty dollars a week he would have to haul five thousand oysters a day in a six-day week—thirty-five small baskets and twenty large ones every day. A “small” one-bushel basket of oysters weighed eighty pounds and a barrel contained three bushels.

Some sloops would leave after unloading, but many local sloops would tie up all night at the barges and leave at first light for the oyster beds. Sloops came in not only from different parts of New York Harbor but from Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, even Cape Cod and the Chesapeake Bay.

According to a May 10, 1853,
New York Herald
article, the nine barges moored at Oliver Slip near the Catherine Market annually earned a half-million dollars in oyster sales, and the dealers who bought their oysters sold them for about a million dollars every year. But, according to the same article, a larger market with twelve barges opposite the Washington Market did far more business.

In 1871, a New York newspaper offered this description:

When the wind changes, the fleet comes up the bay, and then there is a busy scene in the neighborhood off pier No. 54. The dock and its approaches are covered with cartmen, wagons and horses, stevedores, and oyster dealers. The vessels are fastened to the wharf by means of strong hawsers, and the hatches are off fore and aft. In the hold are men filling baskets rapidly, and others stand on deck, rail, and pierstring, ready to pass them to the cart being loaded. All is rush, bustle and trade, flavored with copious dashes of profanity. In front of the scow-warehouses are men continually employed on these days, filling barrels with oysters and heading them up. Inside of the scows dozens of men are opening, while others can them, ready for transmission by rail to Canada, country hotels, and restaurants. All day long, until the cargoes, which are always bespoken, are landed, the work goes on, and when they are discharged the vessels are sent away immediately for more.

It is noteworthy that even in the 1870s, the cartman, a solitary man with a one-horse open-bed carriage, was still an important component in New York City street commerce. It is clear from an 1812 commercial directory of Manhattan that in the early part of the century, cartmen had been the single most plentiful source of employment in New York City. Anyone who had goods to move hired a cartman. They were a ubiquitous and controversial element of perilous Manhattan traffic, notorious for rushing their carts closely past pedestrians, allegedly singling out attractive women to terrorize. Washington Irving satirically commented, “Saw a cartman run down a small boy on Broadway today. What of it? Served him well. Shouldn't have been there in the first place.”

Cartman rates were fixed by law—the rates of cartage. Oysters were one of the better-paying loads. In 1858, a cartman could charge thirty-one cents for each load of oysters. This was not as good as the seventy-five cents allowed for furniture, but was better than a load of bricks, three bales of cotton, five barrels of beef, twenty bushels of salt, or a load of wheat, each of which was only twenty-five cents.

Photo by Berenice Abbott of oyster barges (houses) on South Street and Pike Slip on the East River under the Manhattan side of the Manhattan Bridge.
MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

The commercial demands for Manhattan waterfront space kept growing. An oyster barge lacked the prestige, influence, and economic value of a transatlantic steamer. As more steamers came to New York Harbor, the city kept having the rows of barges moved to new locations. On the Hudson, still known for most of the nineteenth century as the North River, markets that had been on the Vesey Street pier were moved to Spring Street, then West Street, then Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, which from 1865 to 1898 was the central oyster market of Manhattan. Then the barges were moved up to Tenth Street, then to the East River, and their final site in 1912 was near the Manhattan Bridge, though a barge owned by Geo. Still Inc. was tied up in the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge until the early 1940s. From 1898 to 1913, the foreign commerce of the port increased by 131 percent, but wharfage space increased by less than 25 percent. In 1914, the New York Merchants Association declared that the biggest problem facing the city was congestion in the harbor.

Though constantly pushed to another pier by larger industries, during the course of the nineteenth century the floating oyster market became an ever-greater economic force as the oyster trade became more concentrated. According to
The New York Times
in 1883, at least two hundred sloops tied up every day to unload on Manhattan oyster barges. In addition they were receiving oysters by steamboat from Connecticut and the Chesapeake Bay. On September 9, 1883,
The New York Times
quoted one of the larger oyster dealers:

“This consolidation of the oyster interests is one of the most important steps that have ever been taken by the trade,” said Mr. J.W. Boyle. “It is proposed to pool our issues, hire a hall, and organize an Exchange, just as produce merchants and stock brokers have done. It won't be long before all of this is accomplished. The oyster business is growing so tremendously that it will be necessary to unite in order to protect it.”

Most of these ambitious ideas never became reality because though a huge volume of oysters was sold, the prices remained low, limiting the economic importance of the industry. Most of the jobs in the trade were not even full-time. The key to the wholesale oyster business was moving bulk. Frequently visitors to New York would comment on the low oyster prices. With the exception of crises such as the meager harvest in January 1857, prices remained remarkably stable throughout most of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, top-quality oysters, which took at least three years to grow, an acre of beds yielding only five hundred oysters in a harvest, were selling for between $1.00 and $1.50 a basket. An 1881 report on the oyster industry said that prices of New York oysters had not greatly changed over the past fifty years. George Augustus Sala wrote in his 1883 travel memoir,
America Revisited,
“[In New York] oysters in every size and variety of flavor are as cheap as oranges are at Havana—that is to say they may be bought for ‘next to nothing.' ” By 1896, oysters sold wholesale for three for a penny by the bushel.