The Native history of NYC oysters takes center stage in a new reflection on the city’s shoreline and memory. Writer Hrag Vartanian considers how the mollusk became a defining symbol of New York, drawing on Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s installation on Governors Island that assembles roughly one million oyster shells retrieved from Manhattan restaurants. The work, according to Vartanian, prompts a reckoning with Native land and historical memory, from the Lenape presence to the ecological losses that followed the oysters’ decline.
Vartanian traces the arc of the city’s relationship with oysters, recalling Lenape shell middens, their later ubiquity on New York menus, and the environmental damage tied to their disappearance. In Michelson’s installation, he writes, the discarded shells act as quiet rebuttals to the claim that nothing preceded extraction on these shores.
The Lost Pearls of New York City
Walking along Pearl Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown today, few may realize that the name marks the seventeenth-century East River shoreline. The street’s title refers to a Lenape shell midden once located on its southern stretch, believed to have been adjacent to a Lenape canoe landing. As author Mark Kurlansky notes in his book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, these oyster shell accumulations were among the most common markers of pre-European settlements near the mouth of the Hudson. He describes middens that could reach four feet in depth, at times buried and at times heaped high above ground.
Native history of NYC oysters in the news
- A 2,300-year-old papyrus fragment containing lines from Homer’s Odyssey is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offering a rare glimpse of the epic’s ancient transmission.
- As attacks escalate against historic sites and the artworks they hold, Democratic lawmakers and preservation groups are calling for stronger safeguards.
- Twenty-six Islamic artworks from the Louvre Museum are set to be exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, next month.
- The New Museum will open “The Bowery: Devil’s Mile” on September 24, charting four centuries of the storied thoroughfare known for entertainment in both raucous and refined forms.
From the archive
Revisit past coverage exploring how artists and institutions confront urban memory, Indigenous histories, and the afterlives of materials that shaped New York’s waterfront. For more on how cultural workers navigate contested histories, see Calls Grow to Reinstate SAIC professor Savneet Talwar.