I Tried Eating Oysters Like They Did in the 1800s

Stand in a New York street in the early 1800s and hold out a penny. A man at a pushcart will hand you an oyster, opened in front of you, and you will eat it standing there, with the street workers around you. The oyster was not a luxury. It was a habit, as ordinary as bread — the cheapest food in the richest city, served six cents a plate, all you can eat on Canal Street, in cellars and parlours, to bankers and labourers alike. Then Thomas Downing, born on Chincoteague Island to formerly enslaved parents, built a third kind of room at 5 Broad Street: a Black-owned oyster house where Wall Street ate upstairs and the Underground Railroad ran in the cellar, and where the profits funded a school and a suffrage fight. Then the city fouled the harbour that fed it, the beds closed in 1927, and the penny food became a luxury. The reversal this time is quieter: the oyster is coming back not to be eaten, but to do the work it always did — filtering water, building reef, holding a harbour together. The stew survives at Grand Central. The reef is the return. 0:00 The Penny Pushcart 1:00 A Habit, Ordinary as Bread 3:00 Shells Built the City 6:00 A Penny Apiece on Canal Street 8:00 Two Cities, One Oyster 9:00 Downing Arrives 10:00 The Third Room 12:00 The Abolitionist Turn 14:00 The Victoria Watch — Told With the Doubt 16:00 The Restaurant Fades, the Recipe Survives 17:00 Sewage and Typhoid 19:00 The Working World Vanishes 20:00 One Counter, Then 2014 21:00 Schoolchildren Seeding the Reef 22:00 Paved Again, On Purpose 23:00 The Stew Is Memory, the Reef Is Return 25:00 Look Again Sources and uncertainties are named in the video itself. If a date or number here looks off, say so in the comments — corrections get pinned. #OysterHistory #FoodHistory #ThomasDowning #BillionOysterProject #NewYork #ForgottenFoods