Take a walk down Pearl Street today and you will notice quaint, four-story red-brick buildings peering over a European-esque cobblestone street, busy with the incessant Lower Manhattan foot traffic. Take the same walk four centuries ago, through a port street in the 1600s Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, and the bulk of your observations would have been drawn to the iridescent, craggy shells that paved the street, piled up in ‘middens’ against buildings, or washed up with the high tide over the salty waterside road. The Dutch themselves were so moved by the abundance of discarded shells left by the native Lenape in the prior decades that they christened the place Paerlstraat, later known as Pearl Street.

The Harbor-side lane was a microcosm of the city’s oyster-flavored economic and cultural atmosphere. In The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky’s  historical profile of the New York City oyster, Kurlansky explained that “Before the 20th century, when people thought of New York, they thought of oysters. This is what New York was to the world — a great oceangoing port where people ate succulent local oysters from their harbor. Visitors looked forward to trying them. New Yorkers ate them constantly. They also sold them by the millions.” The native New York species Crassostrea virginica, or Eastern Oyster, is renowned as one of the tastiest; all oysters harvested from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico are of the same delectable breed.

The demand for New York oysters ballooned over the 19th century. Oyster cellars like Downing’s Oyster House and Fraunces Tavern could be found on every other corner of Lower Manhattan, their underground locations indicated by a glowing red lantern or red balloon tethered over a descending staircase. Local farmers annually exported over 700 million oysters across the globe by 1880. Michelin star chefs and street vendors alike devised inventive ways to serve the succulent shellfish — fried, raw, or stewed oysters, oyster pie, oyster sauce, and scalloped oysters were each sold fresh for as little as a few cents at the turn of the 20th century. 

So how did it come to be that $40 is the cheapest you’ll find for an oyster dinner in the city today, and FiDi smells more like car exhaust than seaweed?

The termination of all New York oyster production began with broad, rapid industrialization. By the late 1800s, huge waves of immigration coupled with innovation in transportation and production technology transformed the city from a port metropolis to the financial capital of the world. Careless developers authorized an overwhelming quantity of boat traffic, waste dumping, and sewage pollution, turning the bottom of the Harbor into a sludgy muck unable to host fresh oysters. Outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever in the early 1900s were attributed to polluted shellfish, and one by one, toxic oyster beds shut down until the last closed in 1927.  

Losing the oysters was not enough to inspire long-term legal action against pollution until Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972. The Act mandated a minimum standard of wastewater treatment, outlawed dumping pollutants into navigable waters, and empowered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop national water quality criteria recommendations. But the damage was done: 50 years after the Act was passed, oysters harvested in the New York area continue to exhibit levels of toxins too high for human consumption.

In 2014, Murray Fisher and Pete Malinowski, two educators at The Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, decided to embark on an ambitious re-wilding project to change the state of the Harbor. The two founded a nonprofit organization called the Billion Oyster Project, beginning with a small Harbor School project and quickly expanding to create one of the largest city-wide climate-friendly initiatives. Student volunteers for the project plant oyster larvae in 17 reefs around the city, from Coney Island in Brooklyn to SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx. Their goal is to replenish one billion oysters in the Harbor by 2035, and they’ve already restored over 150 million.

Bronx Science student Ananya Kothari ’27 volunteered for the Project and told me about her responsibilities, explaining, “I worked on cleaning the oysters, and I also worked on building the infrastructure that they use to transport those oysters into the ocean. We used a lot of different tools; it was a little bit of the messy work that you don’t really see.” Kothari worked through her Girl Scouts troop as a younger volunteer under the supervision of college students, some of whom work full-time for the project. Working with other public school students, learning about the Harbor’s history, and making a tangible impact on its future, Kothari experienced firsthand the community building that Fisher and Malinowski have made central to their efforts.

Oyster re-wilding is not just a prayer for edible shellfish to return to the city, but a vital step in the restoration of the once-flourishing marine ecosystem. Oysters filter water by consuming nutrients from their surroundings, ingesting important minerals like nitrogen, which would otherwise contribute to killing algae blooms. A single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. Oyster shells also provide homes for sea grapes, slipper snails, and sponges — crustacean species which encrust biological surfaces in order to reproduce and survive. The diverse functionality of the oyster — the ecosystemic jack-of-all-trades — has granted the species the nickname ‘ecosystem engineer’ among scientists. The Billion Oyster Project volunteers plant oyster seeds in found shells and reintroduce them to the Harbor bed to replenish this key player of the environment. 

This is not to say that restoring oysters will reverse the centuries of pollution that left the Harbor virtually lifeless in 1927, nor that the creatures carry any promise of making progress alone. Now more than ever, humans need to do the heavy lifting of rebuilding what was once a delicate web of undersea flora and fauna; this requires that New Yorkers reorient our perception of life in the city and imagine a Manhattan where Pearl Street is iridescent, and the Harbor winds blow salty mist across Wall Street.

In The Big Oyster, Kurlansky writes, “Though [New Yorkers] live by the sea, they take vacations to go somewhere else to be by the sea. Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this: How is it that people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from a waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there?” The most important responsibility the project has undertaken is educating New York students about the historically oceanic nature of our city. Fisher and Malinowski are spreading an appreciation for the marine environment encompassing the island on which we live, commute, and work, which translates into a call to action to restore that same environment.

Kothari appreciated the broader perspective she attained from her time volunteering. “Living in New York City,” she reflected, “you don’t actually realize how much your city is negatively contributing to the environment. You have so much appreciation for where you live, but I think that it definitely is not on your conscience that things like pollution are actively harming the environment around the city, so I think the really valuable thing about the project was that it showed me that there are people who are taking steps to address this problem that wasn’t even at the forefront of my mind. I definitely learned how the New York Harbor is essential to upkeep the city that I live in and use the resources from every single day, and it’s definitely at risk.”

Although no living New Yorkers remember an oyster-paved Pearl Street — nor has anyone consumed a native oyster in this century — the burden to restore the Harbor has fallen on our shoulders. The Billion Oyster Project recognizes the unique role New York City plays in the surrounding environment and invites students to learn the history of this role and make their own impact. Maybe one day the Eastern Oyster will return to the street carts and restaurants of the city, but until then, it is our responsibility to make that possible.

So how did it come to be that $40 is the cheapest you’ll find for an oyster dinner in the city today, and FiDi smells more like car exhaust than seaweed?