Oysters & Pearls

New York was once an oyster city. The harbor was lined with reefs, billions of shells filtering the water, making it clear enough for seagrass and fish to thrive. Oysters were everywhere — on tavern tables, in street carts, in the pockets of dockworkers who pried them open for lunch. The shells paved roads. The middens they left behind were mountains of calcium.

Albatross traced the history for us: how oysters built the city’s appetite and wealth, how the waters were dredged and poisoned until the reefs collapsed. The harbor grew turbid and lifeless. Pearls became the luxury, oysters the memory.

But now, slowly, there are projects to bring them back. Reef restoration teams seed the water with young oysters, hoping they will latch onto shell and rock, build colonies, filter the harbor again. Billion Oyster Project, Harbor School, community divers all working toward a future where oysters return as neighbors, not just cuisine.

For Bluebird, the oysters became a metaphor for archives: shells layering upon shells, memories piling up until they become infrastructure. A reef is a living library, each shell a record, each pearl a kind of footnote. To restore oysters is to restore memory, to rethread the city’s history into its waters.

There’s something humbling about the idea that an oyster — small, patient, filter-feeding in the dark — could help clean a harbor that humans fouled in centuries. And something beautiful in the idea that a pearl, born of irritation and defense, becomes the object we treasure.

Oysters and pearls, reefs and records: New York’s past, and maybe its future.

The Song of the Oysters

Oh gather round, you sailors bold,
and hear a tale of shell and gold,
of oysters once in harbors wide,
where New York’s river meets the tide.

They paved the streets with shells so white,
they lit the taverns through the night,
they fed the hungry, filled the pails,
their middens rose like chalky sails.

But greed will strip a bed to bone,
and dredge the reefs until they’re gone;
the waters fouled, the currents choked,
the city’s memory split and broke.

Yet still a whisper haunts the piers,
a labor humming through the years:
to seed again those patient mouths,
to filter north, to filter south.

A pearl is born of grit and pain,
a gleaming note from harsh refrain.

So let the harbor sing once more,
with oysters layered on the floor.

And may our hands, both rough and kind,
restore the reefs that we maligned;
for in their shells the record lies—
a city written where the water sighs.