The Bottom of the Harbor Read online

  After 1900, as more and more of the harbor became polluted, people began to grow suspicious of harbor oysters, and the bedding business declined. In the summer of 1916, a number of cases of typhoid fever were traced beyond all doubt to the eating of oysters that had been bedded on West Bank Shoal, in the Lower Bay, and it was found that sewage from a huge New Jersey trunk sewer whose outfall is at the confluence of the Kill van Kull and the Upper Bay was being swept through the Narrows and over the beds by the tides. The Department of Health thereupon condemned the beds and banned the business. The bedders were allowed to take up the oysters they had down and rebed them in clean water in various Long Island bays. They didn’t get them all, of course. A few were missed and left behind on every bed. Some of these propagated, and now their descendants are sprinkled over shoaly areas in all the bays below the Narrows. They are found on West Bank Shoal, East Bank Shoal, Old Orchard Shoal, Round Shoal, Flynns Knoll, and Romer Shoal. They live in clumps and patches; a clump may have several dozen oysters in it and a patch may have several hundred. Divers and dredgemen call them wild oysters. It is against state and city laws to “dig, rake, tong, or otherwise remove” these oysters from the water. A few elderly men who once were bedders are still living in the old Staten Island oyster ports, and many sons and grandsons of bedders. They have a proprietary feeling about harbor oysters, and every so often, in cold weather, despite the laws, some of them go out to the old, ruined beds and poach a mess. They know what they are doing; they watch the temperature of the water to make sure the oysters are “sleeping,” or hibernating, before they eat any. Oysters shut their shells and quit feeding and begin to hibernate when the temperature of the water in which they lie goes down to forty-one degrees; in three or four days, they free themselves of whatever germs they may have taken in, and then they are clean and safe.

  There is a physician in his late fifties in St. George whose father and grandfather were bedders. On a wall of his waiting room hangs an heirloom, a chart of oyster plots on West Bank Shoal that was made in 1886 by a marine surveyor for the state; it is wrinkled and finger-smudged and salt-water-spotted, and his grandfather’s plot, which later became his father’s—a hundred and two acres on the outer rim of the shoal, down below Swinburne Island—is bounded on it in red ink. The physician keeps a sea skiff in one of the south-shore ports and goes fishing every decent Sunday. He stores a pair of polehandled tongs in the skiff and sometimes spends a couple of hours hunting for clumps of harbor oysters. One foggy Sunday afternoon last March, he got in his skiff, with a companion, and remarked to the people on the dock that he was going codfishing on the Scallop Ridge, off Rockaway Beach. Instead, picking his way through the fog, he went up to the West Bank and dropped anchor on one of his father’s old beds and began tonging. He made over two dozen grabs and moved the skiff four times before he located a clump. It was a big clump, and he tonged up all the oysters in it; there were exactly sixty. All were mature, all were speckled with little holes made by boring sponges, and all were wedge-shaped. Sea hair, a marine weed, grew thickly on their shells. One was much bigger than the others, and the physician picked it up and smoothed aside its mat of coarse, black, curly sea hair and counted the ridges on its upper shell and said that it was at least fourteen years old. “It’s too big to eat on the half shell,” he told his companion. He bent over the gunnel of the skiff and gently put it back in the water. Then he selected a dozen that ranged in age from four to seven years and opened them. Their meats were well developed and gray-green and glossy. He ate one with relish. “Every time I eat harbor oysters,” he said, “my childhood comes floating up from the bottom of my mind.” He reflected for a few moments. “They have a high iodine content,” he continued, “and they have a characteristic taste. When I was a boy in Prince’s Bay, the old bedders used to say that they tasted like almonds. Since the water went bad, that taste has become more pronounced. It’s become coppery and bitter. If you’ve ever tasted the little nut that’s inside the pit of a peach, the kernel, that’s how they taste.”

  The fish and shellfish in the harbor and in the ocean just outside provide all or part of a living for about fifteen hundred men who call themselves baymen. They work out of bays and inlets and inlets within inlets along the coasts of Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens. Some baymen clam on the public beds. Some baymen set eelpots. Some baymen set pound nets, or fish traps. Pound nets are strung from labyrinths of stakes in shoal areas, out of the way of the harbor traffic. Last year, during the shad, summer herring, and mossbunker migrations, forty-one of them were set off the Staten Island coast, between Midland Beach and Great Kills, in an old oyster-bedding area. Some baymen go out in draggers, or small trawlers, of which there are two fleets in the harbor. One fleet has sixteen boats, and ties up at two shaky piers on Plumb Beach Channel, an inlet just east of Sheepshead Bay, on the Brooklyn coast. The other has nine boats, and ties up alongside a quay on the west branch of Mill Basin, a three-branched inlet in the bulrush marshes in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn. The majority of the men in both fleets are Italian-Americans, a few of whom in their youth fished out of the Sicilian ports of Palermo and Castellammare del Golfo. Some of them tack saints’ pictures and miraculous medals and scapular medals and little evil-eye amulets on the walls of their pilothouses. The amulets are in the shape of hunchbacks, goat horns, fists with two fingers upraised, and opened scissors; they come from stores on Mulberry Street and are made of plastic. The harbor draggers range from thirty to fifty feet and carry two to five men. According to the weather and the season, they drag their baglike nets in the Lower Bay or in a fishing ground called the Mud Hole, which lies south of Scotland and Ambrose lightships and is about fifteen miles long and five to ten miles wide. The Mud Hole is the upper part of the Old Hudson River Canyon, which was the bed of the river twenty thousand years ago, when the river flowed a hundred and twenty-five miles past what is now Sandy Hook before it reached the ocean. The draggers catch lower-depth and bottom feeders, chiefly whiting, butterfish, ling, cod, porgy, fluke, and flounder. They go out around 4 A.M. and return around 4 P.M., and their catches are picked up by trucks and taken to Fulton Market.

  Some baymen set lines of lobster pots. In days gone by, there was a bountiful stock of lobsters in the harbor. Between 1915 and 1920, owing to pollution and overfishing and the bootlegging of berries, which are egg-carrying lobsters, and shorts and crickets, which are undersized lobsters, the stock began dwindling at a rapid rate. As late as 1920, forty-five lobstermen were still working the Upper Bay, the Narrows, and the Lower Bay. They ran out of seven inlets in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and their buoys dipped and danced all the way from the Statue of Liberty to the Hook. Every year in the twenties, a few of them either dropped out for good or bought bigger boats and forsook the bays and started setting pots out beyond the three-mile limit, in the harbor approaches. By 1930, only one lobsterman of any importance, Sandy Cuthbert, of Prince’s Bay, continued to work the bays. In the fall of that year, at the close of the season, Mr. Cuthbert took up his pots—he had two hundred and fifty—and stacked them on the bank of Lemon Creek, an inlet of Prince’s Bay, and went into the rowboat-renting and fish-bait business. His pots are still there, rotting; generations of morning-glory and wild-hop vines are raveled in their slats and hold them together. During the thirties and forties, the lobsters began coming back, and divers say that now there are quite a few nests in the Upper Bay and many nests in the Lower Bay. However, they are still too scarce and scattered to be profitable. Sometimes, while repairing cables or pipelines on the bottom in parts of the Lower Bay where the water is clear and the visiblity is good, divers turn over rocks and pieces of waterlogged driftwood and lobsters scuttle out and the divers pick them up and put them in the tool sacks hooked to their belts.

  At present, there are nine lobster boats working out of the harbor—six out of Plumb Beach; two out of Ulmer Park, on Gravesend Bay; and one out of Coney Island Creek. They are of the sea-skiff type. They range fr
om twenty-six to twenty-eight feet, they are equipped with gasoline engines that are strong enough for much bigger boats, and, except for canvas spray hoods, they are open to the weather. The men on these boats are Scandinavians and Italians. They set their pots in a section of the Mud Hole southeast of Ambrose Lightship where the water in most places is over a hundred feet deep. They use the trawl method, in which the pots are hung at intervals from thick, tarred lines half a mile long; as a rule, thirty-five pots are hung from each line. The lines are buoyed at both ends with bundles of old, discarded ferryboat life preservers, which the lobstermen buy from a ship chandler in Fulton Market, who buys them from the Department of Marine and Aviation. Once a day, the lines are lifted, and each pot is pulled up and emptied of lobsters and chewed-up bait and stray crabs and fish, and rebaited with three or four dead mossbunkers. The coastwise and South American shipping lanes cross the lobster grounds in the Mud Hole, and every now and then a ship plows into a line and tears it loose from its buoys. Dump scows with rubbish from the city sometimes unload on the grounds and foul the lines and bury the pots. Mud Hole lobsters are as good as Maine lobsters; they can’t be told apart. Some are sold to knowledgeable Brooklyn housewives who drive down to the piers in the middle of the afternoon, when the boats come in, and take their pick, but most are sold to Brooklyn restaurants. A boat working seven lines, which is the average, often comes in with around two hundred and fifty pounds.

  A good many baymen work on public fishing boats that take sports fishermen out to fishing grounds in the harbor, in the harbor approaches, and along the Jersey coast. These boats are of two types—charter and party. Charter boats are cabin cruisers that may be hired on a daily or weekly basis. They are used for going after roaming surface feeders, big and small. Most of them are equipped with fighting chairs, fish hoists, and other contrivances for big-game fishing. They go out in the Lower Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, and Raritan Bay for striped bass, bluefish, and mackerel, and they go out to the Mud Hole and the Jersey grounds for tuna, albacore, bonito, and skipjack. They carry a captain and a mate, who baits and gaffs. Great Kills, which has fifteen boats, and Prince’s Bay, which has eight, are the principal charter-boat ports in the harbor.

  Party boats, also called open boats, are bigger boats, which operate on regular schedules and are open to anyone who has the fare; it varies from three and a half to five dollars a day. Sheepshead Bay is the principal party-boat port. It has over fifty boats. All of them leave from Emmons Avenue, which many people consider the most attractive waterfront street in the city. Emmons is a wide street, with a row of fluttery-leaved plane trees down the middle of it, that runs along the north shore of the bay. It smells of the sea, and of beer and broiled fish. On one side of it, for a dozen blocks, are bar-and-grills, seafood restaurants, clam stands, diners, pizza parlors, tackle and boat-gear stores, and fish markets, one of which has a cynical sign in its show window that says, “CATCH YOUR FISH ON THE NEVER-FAIL BANKS. USE A SILVER HOOK.” The party-boat piers—there are ten of them, and they are long and roomy—jut out diagonally from the other side. Retired men from all over Brooklyn come down to the piers by bus and subway on sunny days and sit on the string-pieces and watch the boats go out, and rejuvenate their lungs with the brine in the air, and fish for blue-claw crabs with collapsible wirework traps, and quarrel with each other over the gulls; some bring paper bags of table scraps from home and feed the gulls and coo at them, and some despise the gulls and shoo them away and would wring their necks if they could get their hands on them. Among the boats in the Sheepshead Bay fleet are stripped-down draggers, converted yachts, and converted subchasers from both World Wars. The majority carry a captain and a mate and take around thirty passengers; the old subchasers carry a captain, a mate, an engineer, a cook, and a deckhand and take up to a hundred and ten passengers. Some have battered iceboxes on their decks and sell beer and pop and sandwiches, and some have galleys and sell hot meals. Some have conventional fishing-boat names, such as the Sea Pigeon, the Dorothy B, and the Carrie D II, and some have strutty names, such as the Atomic, the Rocket, and the Glory. Most of them leave at 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 A.M. and stay out the better part of the day. The passengers bring their own tackle, and fish over the rails. Bait is supplied by the boats; it is included in the fare. In most seasons, for most species, shucked and cut-up skimmer clams are used. These are big, coarse, golden-meated ocean clams. Cut-up fish, live fish, fiddler crabs, calico crabs, sand worms, and blood worms are also used. There are two dozen baymen in Sheepshead Bay who dig, dredge, net, and trap bait. They deliver it to three bait barges moored in the bay, and the barge-keepers put it into shape and sell it to the party boats by the tubful. For five weeks or so in the spring and for five weeks or so in the fall, during the mackerel migrations, the party boats go out and find schools of mackerel and anchor in the midst of them. The rest of the year, they go out and anchor over wrecks, reefs, scow dumps, and shellfish beds, where cod, ling, porgy, fluke, flounder, sea bass, blackfish, and other bottom feeders congregate.

  There are many wrecks—maybe a hundred, maybe twice that; no one knows how many—lying on the bottom in the harbor approaches. Some are intact and some are broken up. Some are out in the Old Hudson River Canyon, with over two hundred feet of water on top of them. Some are close to shore, in depths of only twenty to thirty feet; around noon, on unusually clear, sunny fall days, when there is not much plankton in the water and the turbidity is low, it is possible to see these and see schools of sea bass streaming in and out of holes in their hulls. The wrecks furnish shelter for fish. Furthermore, they are coated, inside and out, with a lush, furry growth made up of algae, sea moss, tube worms, barnacles, horse mussels, sea anemones, sea squirts, sea mice, sea snails, and scores of other organisms, all of which are food for fish. The most popular party boats are those whose captains can locate the fishiest wrecks and bridle them. Bridling is a maneuver in which, say the wreck lies north and south, the party boat goes in athwart it and drops one anchor to the east of it and another to the west of it, so that party boat and wreck lie crisscross. Held thus, the party boat can’t be skewed about by the wind and tide, and the passengers fishing over both rails can always be sure that they are dropping their bait on the wreck, or inside it. Good party-boat captains, by taking bearings on landmarks and lightships and buoys, can locate and bridle anywhere from ten to thirty wrecks. A number of the wrecks are quite old; they disintegrate slowly. Three old ones, all sailing ships, lie close to each other near the riprap jetty at Rockaway Point, in the mouth of the harbor. The oldest of the three, the Black Warrior Wreck, which shelters tons of sea bass from June until November, went down in 1859. The name of the next oldest has been forgotten and she is called the Snow Wreck; a snow is a kind of squarerigged ship similar to a brig; she sank in 1886, or 1887. The third one is an Italian ship that sank in 1890 with a cargo of marble slabs; her name has also been forgotten and she is called the Tombstone Wreck, the Granite Wreck, or the Italian Wreck. Over to the east, off the Rockaways, there is another group of old ones. In this group, all within five miles of shore, are the steamship Iberia, which sank in a snowstorm in 1889, after colliding with the steamship Umbria; the Wire Wreck, a sailing ship that sank around 1895 while outbound with a cargo of bedsprings and other wire products; the Boyle Wreck, a tug that sank around 1900; and the East Wreck, three coal barges that snapped their tow in a storm in 1917 and settled on the bottom in an equilateral triangle. Several of these wrecks have been fished steadily for generations, and party-boat captains like to say that they would be worth salvaging just to get the metal in the hooks and sinkers that have been snagged on them.

  There are stretches of reefy bottom in the harbor approaches that are almost as productive of fish as the wrecks, and for the same reasons. These stretches are easier to locate than the wrecks, and much easier to fish. All have been named. Some are natural rock ledges, and among these are the Shrewsbury Rocks, the Buoy Four Grounds, the Cholera Bank, the Klondike Banks, the Seventeen Fa
thoms, and the Farms. Some are artificial ledges, consisting of debris from excavations and torn-down buildings that was transported from the city in scows and dumped. One such is the Subway Rocks, a ridge of underwater hills beginning four miles south of Ambrose Lightship and running south for several miles, that was made of rocks, bricks, concrete, asphalt, and earth excavated during the construction of the Eighth Avenue Subway. Another such is the New Grounds, or Doorknob Grounds, a stretch of bottom in the northwest corner of the Mud Hole that is used as a dump for slum-clearance projects. There are bricks and brownstone blocks and plaster and broken glass from hundreds upon hundreds of condemned tenements in the New Grounds. The ruins of the somber old red-brick houses in the Lung Block, which were torn down to make way for Knickerbocker Village, lie there. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these houses were occupied by well-to-do families; from around 1890 until around 1905, most of them were brothels for sailors; from around 1905 until they were torn down, in 1933, they were rented to the poorest of the poor, and the tuberculosis death rate was higher in that block than in any other block in the city. All the organisms that grow on wrecks grow on the hills of rubble and rubbish in the Subway Rocks and the New Grounds.