TOUCH: Staten Island’s ancient oyster middens

One might not expect that Amboy Road in southern Staten Island—now home to King Smoke, Wei Wei Nails, We Buy Gold—was once paved in oyster shells. But at the turn of the twentieth century, the neighborhood of Prince’s Bay was one of the top oyster producers in the world and, long before that, a rich source of shellfish for the Lenape. During the so-called golden age of oysters, from about 1880 to 1905, local packing plants exported more than four hundred barrels of oysters a day to Europe and the world. New Yorkers themselves were consuming about one million oysters a day. At about a penny each, and often sold from street carts, the briny bivalves were the Sabrett hot dogs of the era. An especially fruitful harvesting site was Lemon Creek, one of the longest aboveground waterways in New York City.

The creek meanders for more than three miles, from the Sandy Ground community in Rossville–the oldest continuously inhabited free Black settlement in the country–to Raritan Bay. It flows past McMansions and historic boating clubs, through woodlands, and beneath thrumming overpasses. One spring Saturday, I attended a walking tour of the creek led by photographer-journalist Nathan Kensinger and sponsored by a local councilmember and the conservation nonprofit NYC H20. Our first stops were a few historic homes of oyster tradesmen, from a clapboard farmhouse just steps from a strip mall to the landmarked Victorian home of oyster baron John Ellsworth, who kept creekside oyster beds a few blocks down Bayview Avenue.

In a joint effort between the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Lemon Creek watershed and tidal wetlands area is one of many local bodies of water being managed as part of the Staten Island Bluebelt program, a stormwater-management system that helps drain more than ten thousand acres across the borough. As it does for other bodies of water, the Bluebelt project preserves Lemon Creek’s natural drainage features, helping it store, filter, and convey runoff precipitation, reducing flooding, and improving the water’s health, while providing undeveloped green space and wildlife habitat.

Just down Bayview Avenue from the Ellsworth home, we stood by the edge of the creek at the exact spot where Ellsworth’s packing plant once stood. We saw a few fish flickering beneath the surface. As Joseph Mitchell describes in his 1956 essay about a Sandy Ground resident, “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” once the local native oyster beds had been depleted at the turn of the nineteenth century, a group of Staten Island shipowners decided to buy immature oysters from areas south of the city and “seed” them here to regenerate the population. The effort was triumphant: The oyster beds eventually spread over nine thousand acres of the harbor bottom, and during the “golden age,” more than a thousand men were employed in the industry, including the free Black residents of Sandy Ground. But in the early twentieth century, the bay became polluted by sewage and factory runoff, and people became suspicious of the oysters once proudly known as “Prince’s Bays.” The creek area does still harbor some (inedible) oysters, though, and the Billion Oyster Project has set up two pilot-scale reefs in the area.

We followed the creek’s path along a hiking trail into the woods, tramping over early spring moss and skunk cabbage, twigs cracking underfoot, the branches above still bare. From a hilly vantage we were able to gaze out over Lemon Creek and picture the horses that once grazed on this marshland, and the boats that plied the waterway, carrying “commuters” around southern Staten Island.

When I dug my boot into the muddy bank, a few oyster shells tumbled out like shards of china: I was standing atop an oyster midden. Even older middens, likely from the Lenape, can be found in Conference House Park, at the southernmost tip of the island, and along Sherrott’s Shoreline on the western coast. I strolled onward, fondling the rough-smooth, craggy-edged oyster shells rattling in my pocket. Looking down from an overpass, I saw white specks glinting on the shore. I scrambled down and burrowed my fingers into the earth, running my fingertips over the scalloped shells, their chalky layers chipping and crumbling under the lightest touch. These were the remnants of the golden age of oysters, of the boatmen and barrels, the rakes and tongs, the columned mansions and street vendors from the Lower East Side to London.

We passed an area where McMansions abutted the creek, with shrink-wrapped McYachts parked in their driveways–the descendants of the oyster sloops of yore?

Our path took a turn back down Bayview Avenue, where the shacks of the Lemon Creek Boatmen’s Association still stand, its  hand-painted sign marked by two swords  and depicting a two-jibbed sloop under sail, a contrast to the ramshackle motor- and sailboats moored in the creek out back, many of which suffered significant damage in Hurricane Sandy.

One such boat slumped on a trailer, its name either auspicious or nostalgic of once and future oysters.

A few paces down Bayview Avenue was a dirt path called Broken Shell Road, which was, unlike Amboy Road, actually paved in oyster shells.

Several wooden skeletons of boats and docks lurked in the creek’s shallows at the end of the road.

And finally we reached the glittering expanse of Raritan Bay, into which Lemon Creek pours its history. From the beach, the remn ants of oyster shells still drift out into the tide, and on to the rest of the city City, and to the world.

Many thanks to Nathan Kensinger and his Water Towns project, and to NYC H2O.