Awe, Shucks

Five Years Ahead of Schedule, Riparian Repair Project Is Making History on the Half-Shell

Thanks to a Lower Manhattan nonprofit, New York is making progress on recapturing its erstwhile status as oyster capital of the world, a title relinquished in 1927 when rampant water pollution and unrestrained over-harvesting led the City to close its last remaining bed of bivalves. That was the final patch of what had once been more than 300 underwater square miles of New York oyster colonies. In the decades that followed, oysters became “functionally extinct” in New York waters, a term that denotes a population so depleted that it no longer participates significantly in a local ecosystem.

So things remained until 2014, when Lower Manhattan residents Murray Fisher (founder of the Harbor School) and Pete Malinowski seized upon the idea of leveraging environmental improvements since the ratification of the Clean Water Act in 1972 to see whether New York waters could support the reintroduction of oysters.

Christening their undertaking the Billion Oyster Project (BOP), the team set for itself the goal of incubating and cultivating a milliard of mollusks, as well as designing, building, placing, and monitoring reefs that would shelter the oysters. If successful, they knew the benefits would be considerable. A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water each day, using its gills to remove impurities like algae, dirt, and microscopic particles, along with hazards such as nitrogen (from fertilizers) and heavy metals. The reefs that inevitably form from generations of accumulated oyster shells create not only a habitat for diverse marine life but also strengthen shorelines, erecting natural barriers against storm surges and flooding. They reasoned that a billion oysters was “a population-level goal that moves New York Harbor toward lasting recovery.”

“That is a threshold where we can see a self-sustaining system” that could filter the water in New York Harbor completely every three days, noted Mike Altman, BOP’s senior marketing and communications manager. In the last 12 years, BOP has restored more than 200 million oysters and 19 acres of underwater reef.

“Our other goal,” Mr. Altman continued, “is to engage one million New York City students in that work—get them outside and closer to the water, and understanding that they’re living in an estuary.” Thus far, BOP has engaged 40,594 New York students, through 1,288 local teachers.

In addition to students and teachers, BOP recruits adult volunteers for work on Governors Island that includes shoveling, sorting, cleaning and crushing shells, mixing concrete, and casting reef structures. Oyster reef restoration is popular as a team-building exercise for corporations. Public volunteering opportunities are posted at billionoysterproject.org and spots fill up quickly. Longtime volunteers can even get out on the water to help assess wild oyster populations and monitor BOP reefs around edges of the city.

To build the foundations of new reefs, BOP collects more than 300,000 pounds of oyster shells from New York restaurants each year. The shells are hauled to the group’s headquarters on Governors Island, where they are piled into small mountains.

After curing in the sun for a year, the shells are shoveled into smaller piles and cleaned. Some are placed within reef balls that have been made by other teams of volunteers, which are then are seeded with spat (baby oysters).

“Those oysters are moved throughout the city by barge, and dispersed to different installations,” Mr. Altman explained. “We monitor them for five years, and then we let nature do its thing.”

He noted, “we have about nine active reef sites. The most recent ones we are installing this summer are off Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and in the Bronx River. We did an installation called the Living Breakwaters off the coast of Staten Island. We also have one that’s been many years in the making at Brooklyn Bridge Park.”

There are no reefs in the waters off Lower Manhattan, but the Billion Oyster Project does monitor three local oyster research stations—one at South Street Seaport and two installed several weeks ago at the Pier A inlet in Battery Park City. Oyster research stations are underwater cages that hold oysters and other marine life. Teachers and students regularly pull up the cages to measure oyster growth and collect data about biodiversity.

Original estimates were that it would take more than two decades to reach the ten-figure threshold, but those goalposts have been moved (favorably). Now at 200 million oysters seeded around the city, BOP will soon possess a larger barge that will let the organization place millions more every year, hastening the target year for a billion oysters from 2035 to 2030.

In the 1600s, New York waters were said to be home to half the world’s oyster population. The legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell recalled in his memoir, “Up in the Old Hotel,” that “oysters routinely grew to the size of dinner plates in the present-day Gowanus Canal.”

The epicenter of this culinary culture was Lower Manhattan. Pearl Street takes its name from the large piles of discarded shells left by Lenape Indians, which were crushed by early Dutch settlers and used to pave the road.

Two centuries later, on nearby Broad Street, a Black man born into slavery in Virginia presided over the eponymous Thomas Downing Oyster House, one of the most fashionable New York restaurants of the early 1800s. Downing transformed what was then working-class fare (oysters were that era’s equivalent of hot dogs, and even sold from street carts) and gave it gourmet cachet by rowing out before dawn to meet oyster boats returning to the Fulton Fish Market, and bargaining with captains for the best of their catch. By night, Downing operated a secret stop on the Underground Railroad. When he died in 1866, Downing was among the wealthiest men of New York, of any race.

But in the 1840s, New York launched its central sewer system, which pumped raw effluent into the harbor. Disease began to kill large numbers of local oysters, and even those that survived were unsafe to eat.

This is the legacy that will take the longest to reverse. As the BOP website cautions, “we do not and cannot eat oysters from New York Harbor. Harvesting oysters from New York Harbor is illegal, dangerous, and not the goal of our restoration work.” Experts estimate that local oysters may be safe to eat once again sometime in the 22nd century.