Inside New York’s Mission to Add One Billion Oysters to Its Harbor by 2035

By Tanner Garrity Millions of Ellis Island immigrants entered New York City expecting to find streets “paved with gold.” They found them piled with oyster shells instead. It’s difficult to overstate just how significant oysters once were to life in New York — it took nonfiction writer Mark Kurlanksky 325 pages to get the point across in his book The Big Oyster— but one jaw-dropping statistic should put the relationship into perspective: at the beginning of the 17th century, half of the world’s oyster population could be found in New York Harbor. Oysters carts were the original hot dog stands. …

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