Review by ELIZABETH ROYTE
--
Posted by roz
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05royte.html
History of nyc and its waterways
--
New Yorkers, it seems, are endlessly fascinated by their city. They can't stop writing books about the place, and so must come up with ever more different angles. Mark Kurlansky, who has formerly looked beyond Gotham to write about cod and salt, in "Cod" and "Salt," now turns his attention to his own backyard. His New York history, "The Big Oyster," takes us from the vague and misty era of the Lenape Indians, through the oyster boom of the late 19th century, to the noxious specifics that closed the city's last oyster beds in 1927.
Envision/Corbis
The oyster is their world: a spread at the Grand Central Oyster Bar.
History on the Half Shell.
By Mark Kurlansky.
Illustrated. 307 pp. Ballantine Books. $23.95.
The story is simple enough: New York became a great city because it sits at the confluence of several great rivers that form a deep and protected harbor. The rivers gave access to natural resources, and the port let merchants ship this stuff out. The estuary of the lower Hudson, which had 350 square miles of oyster beds, was a textbook place for Crassostrea virginica, which thrive in intertidal and subtidal areas rinsed with nutrient-rich river water. The Lenape ate oysters, the Dutch ate oysters, the English ate oysters too. But by the late 18th century, everyone knew this dietary staple wouldn't last forever, that "Eden had its limits." First the city restricted who could harvest oysters, and then when. As technology made it easier to take a lot of oysters quickly, the city moved to limit the use of dredges and steam power as well.
Meanwhile, the population of New York climbed, and the constant discharge of garbage and sewage began to take a different sort of toll on the harbor floor. There were plenty of complaints, especially when cholera and typhoid broke out, but little action. Instead, oystermen perfected the art of transplanting and then cultivating oyster seed in clean places like the Great South Bay. "Such newfound powers were making humankind giddy with science's magical ability to withstand its own foolish excess," Kurlansky writes, almost giddy himself.
The advent of cultivation had tremendous commercial implications. Workers shucked and pickled as fast as they could, shipping barrels of oysters far and wide. Kurlansky's locomotive prose makes it easy to visualize oyster trails pulsing across a world map: north up the Hudson, west to the Pacific, east across the Atlantic. It was the golden age of New York oysterdom: the city was "overtaken by oystermania." In 1860, some 12 million oysters were sold in New York markets; by 1880, the area's oyster beds were producing 700 million a year. New Yorkers rich and poor were slurping the creatures in oyster cellars, saloons, stands, houses, cafes and restaurants, about which we hear a great deal (this in addition to digressions on property rights, steam engines, prostitution, sanitation, slum clearance, the Civil War draft riots and folding beds). Oysters were cheap; they were eaten pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried and scalloped; in soups, patties and puddings; for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If a customer on "the Canal Street plan" (all you can eat for 6 cents) consumed too many, the management would give him an oyster with its shell loosely open "in the hopes that after a few minutes, the avaricious client would be eating nothing for several days."
"The Big Oyster" proves that it is possible for a skilled researcher to tell the history of New York — its wealth, excitement, greed, destructiveness and filth — through the history of a single creature. But it's a fallacy to think that the story of oysters is the story of New York. "Before the 20th century, when people thought of New York, they thought of oysters," Kurlansky writes. That's a fair enough, if surprising, assertion, but it's his job to prove it. At times, you can hear the microfilm wheels screeching as Kurlansky, wearing oyster-colored glasses, scours diaries, menus, letters, newspapers and magazines in search of evidence. Sure, this is a book about oysters, but many of the references to oyster-love seem like padding or name-dropping. We learn that Samuel Pepys "mentions oysters 50 times in his diaries" (but we get no more on that topic); we learn the names of, but little more about, various businessmen, actors, politicians and prostitutes who consumed oysters in the city; and we learn that the British prime minister, in 1715, ran up big bills shipping New York oysters to himself. "Uncle!" one cries, wondering if Kurlansky was paid in oysters per word.
For the most part, Kurlansky is a genial and enthusiastic guide. He's often quite funny, making jokes at New Yorkers' expense: we're brash, we're obsessed with money, we eat our food live. He does a decent job on the oyster's peculiar natural history, which allows it to be transplanted, and also to be transported alive. It turns out that most of the oysters we eat in eastern North America, from the Gulf of Mexico to Novia Scotia and north, are biologically identical. If their taste, size, shape and color differ, it's only because of the water they finished growing up in. Oysters, in short, have their own sort of terroir.
But while Kurlansky's city bustles, reeks and gleams, the oyster itself — despite the ecological walk-through — never really comes to life, at least not in the way that William W. Warner's Atlantic blue crabs do in the classic "Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay." The book has too many sentences with a deadening feel: "Shark fishing was a popular sport." Or, "The Prince de Joinville was another Delmonico regular." "The Big Oyster" is often claustrophobic with numbers — prices, tonnages, export rates, market taxes — and sodden with recipes (dozens of them, mostly variations on flour, butter and Crassostrea). Redundancies clog the narrative, and Kurlansky is often vague. He notes the link between sex and oysters — the city's oyster houses sported red balloons, just as bordellos were marked by red lights — but he doesn't address the belief that oysters are aphrodisiacal except to note that they are high in zinc, which promotes testosterone. There are other lapses: he tells us Crepidula fornicata doomed British oysters, but not what Crepidula fornicata is (a slipper limpet). Weirdly, he reports temperatures in Fahrenheit and centigrade and neglects to translate shillings and pounds into money today's American reader can understand.
Such quibbles won't bother the die-hard Kurlansky fan, and they certainly didn't keep me from appreciating that Kurlansky's real subject, the one that raises this book above the story of seafood, is the history of the trashing of New York. It's a cautionary tale that, though often repeated, we seem helpless to learn from. We pay attention to our natural resources only when we start to feel sick — either in the gut or in the wallet. By the middle of the 19th century, "the rivers that filled the harbor with fresh water, making oyster beds grow, were now filling the harbor with deadly chemicals." In 1927, the city's last oyster beds closed, and purveyors switched to cleaner sources. But the fouling of the waters only intensified — with discharges of pesticides, heavy metals, asbestos, solvents, oil and PCB's — until enactment of the Clean Water Act in 1972. Today, the Hudson estuary is too polluted to support oysters one could safely eat. That's bad enough, but for Kurlansky — and all New Yorkers — there's something even worse: the city that once drew its economic and social lifeblood from its waterfront has "lost its direct connection to its own vast and once sweet-smelling sea."
No comments:
Post a Comment