BROOKLYN'S LIFE AQUATIC
How oysters may save the Gowanus
Standing on the bank of the grimy Gowanus Canal, aphrodisiacs don’t automatically spring to mind. However, lodged among the car wreckage, sewage and Gambino body parts, lies a thriving colony of oysters, chilling, eating, procreating and staying close to home—not unlike many street corners in various popular Brooklyn neighborhoods.Before there’s a run on cocktail sauce, lemon wedges, these bivalves are not exactly bound for the ice trays of The Oyster Bar at Grand Central. No, eating an oyster from the bottom of these waters would be gastronomic Russian Roulette. Think instead of little Al Gore mollusks: maybe gobbling up a little too much as they work but, along the way, making the environment a cleaner, safer place for the rest of us.
Most of us think of oysters merely as odd-looking appetizers and slow, but steady pearl producers. But in reality, they play a crucial role in the health of the bodies of water in which they reside. Each oyster by its natural functions cleans and builds and contributes to the life around it. So it goes that, the dirtier the water, the less edible the oyster. And the present day Gowanus—a grimy stretch of Brooklyn with chain-link fences and a dilapidated squat house called the Bat Cave across the way—is a pretty messy home.
“Oysters are native to the Gowanus,” explains Katie Mosher-Smith, a young Vermont native and mother of two who now lives in the neighborhood. She’s also the program director for the Gowanus Oyster Stewards. "They’re native to all of the East Coast. In fact, the Gowanus had tons of oysters—food for the rich and food for the poor. They were big back then—the size of dinner plates, it’s said.” According to Mosher-Smith, when the Gowanus was a navigable channel, the oysters would clean the water and formed an ecosystem, like building reefs, that provided natural filtration. “But all the harvesting and the dredging kind of wiped out the oysters,” she explains. She says it will take a “hybridization of remediation” to clean up Gowanus and other bodies of water like it, but history has taught us that oysters are cheap and effective labor.
Mosher-Smith coordinates a cadre of neighborhood residents who come down to this stretch of the Gowanus Canal most Saturday afternoons to haul out their oyster nets and count, measure and clean the oyster population. Sitting around with this earnest group of urban environmentalists, scrubbing shellfish and learning about the seals that used to navigate this stretch of water and the squatters and gentrifiers that do now, the experience is a combo of a day at the dog park, an afternoon planting trees and a symposium on the evolution of Brooklyn.
There’s a familiar, jokey aspect to the Saturday gatherings. Everyone puts on thick rubber gloves and cleans, counts, measures and chats. Kids and dogs pad about the water and rustle around with the stacks of kayaks that belong to fellow activists, the Gowanus Dredgers. It’s like a staff retreat of mostly thirtysomething, mostly white professionals are a mixture of neighborhood activists, environmental enthusiasts, grad students and educators all feeling like they’re doing their part to get the city’s water a little cleaner.
This oyster renaissance is thriving beyond Gowanus—like the Harbor School, a high school in Bushwick, which is devoted to maritime studies. During a recent party on Pier 40 organized by the River Project, a couple of Harbor School students explained to curious adults all about their atypically Bushwickian forays along New York’s Waterway. Jeriel Stafford is a 10th grader from Brownsville who inherited his fascination with the life aquatic from his father who worked on a sailboat back in his native Granada.
Young Stafford explains how he goes a couple of Saturdays out of every month to collect oysters, measure them and see if they’re actually growing. He makes sure to point out that “in Harlem, the oysters grow slowly because of the CSO.” That’s the oh-so-appetizing “combined sewage overflow.” Enough said.
Teachers in Carroll Gardens/Gowanus (more of a generational than spatial distinction from what I understand) are using this project to connect with their students in a multitude of ways. Keith Wynne teaches upper elementary science at the Carroll School in the neighborhood. He describes working with Mosher-Smith and the Gowanus Oyster Stewards to teach his students: how to take care of oysters, why you’d want to be an oyster gardener and what benefits oysters have for our environment. Along with the intrinsic preference kids have for mucking around outside, Wynne’s students also “share stories with their parents and grandparents who grew up in the neighborhood, who can remember playing around the canal. It’s a real way to build bridges between generations.”
Then again, those lessons from the past may not be as distant as some may think. As one young woman who grew up in Howard Beach said, “Fuck a hundred years ago, people I grew up with in the neighborhood were eating oysters out of the water 10 years ago. Yuck.”
There’s also a social aspect to the oyster project: Saturday oyster gatherings, parties, meetings, art projects, T-shirts. New York can be such a paradoxically overcrowded, isolating place to live, people seek out little niches in which to band together and coexist—not unlike groups of oysters—in small societies based on common interests. As much as it may seem that Brooklyn oyster gatherings would be fertile soil for a wacky mélange of characters, it’s actually an impressively earnest, professional and dedicated crew. The strangest comment to come out of the oyster party was from a young woman who said that she felt like “a fish trapped in a human’s body,” but that didn’t mean that she wandered around Union Square with papier-mâché gills and anti-hook propaganda. No, instead she’s devoted herself to marrying art and the environment and developing naturally-powered coral reefs to clean waterways and protect under-sea populations.
It’s a somewhat peculiar (if currently trendy) calling, to be an urban environmentalist. A common theme among the people involved in this project—and the related maritime projects connected together by common goals and crossover events—was that they had come to New York like many others, for work, change of lifestyle, social opportunities and all that, but missed the easier connection to nature that exists in less paved-over parts of the world. “There were some environmental issues I got involved in near a place we have Upstate,” recalls Mosher-Smith. “And that’s probably what took me in this direction. Also, I wanted to teach my kids that when you see a problem, you can figure out a way to get involved and make it better.”
So far, it’s unclear how effective this cleaning effort will be. The toxic output of the city is a formidable foe. But perhaps, someday, maybe even when the third graders of Mr. Wynne’s class at the Carroll school are all grown up, they’ll sit on the bank of the Gowanus Canal, sucking down fresh oysters to prime themselves to create yet new generations of urban environmentalists. Like Brooklyn, oysters are an acquired taste. And like New York, environmentalism can be a pain in the ass.
