![]() Their business model is to combine maritime preservation with their restaurants they own Grand Banks, an oyster bar operating in a ca. It sounds outlandish, but the Pincus brothers have some experience with this. It moldered on site, so unsound that it couldn’t be used for storage, until two Manhattan restaurateurs, brothers Alex and Miles Pincus, bought the wreck with the intent of returning it to New York City and opening it as a restaurant. Once there, its mooring was surrounded by landfill and the barge was used serially as a speakeasy, a restaurant, and then finally as a dive bar, before being shuttered for good in 1987. 1850 barges was moved from “Oyster Row” on the Gansevoort Pier on the Hudson River to Fair Haven Marina on the Quinnipiac River by that marina’s owner, Ernest Ball. As this New York Times article reports, in the 1920s (well into the decline of NYC’s oystering days), one of New York City’s ca. There is one remaining artefact from NYC’s oyster barges. RELATED: The New York City Oyster: Crassostrea Virginica ![]() Huge piles of oyster shells amassed on South Street, waiting to be carted off to make lime. Once inside, the oysters were packed into barrels, shucked and canned for shipping, or sold live to local vendors and consumers who carried their purchases, in the case of the photo, out the South Street door, up a ramp, and then into the city. Oysters were loaded directly from boats through the river faces of the barges. The barges weren’t vessels rather, they were semi-permanent moored structures that jutted into the East and Hudson rivers. The barges that lined South Street are sometimes called houseboats-and that’s closer to what they were. “Barge” is an ungenerous word for these long, narrow structures, whose street-side facades had plentiful, ornate windows intricately bracketed overhangs, and elegant signage. ![]() In my article, we used a well-known photo taken in 1937 of two oyster barges docked under the Manhattan Bridge on South Street and Pike Slip. Harbor and pronounced the word, “erster.” An entire New York City food culture seems to have vanished. Tragically, you’d be laughed out of town if you pronounced “oyster” in the native dialect that my grandfather used he worked on a tugboat in N.Y. We no longer recognize that red muslin wraps on a lantern indicate an oyster bar within. Our once standard oyster carts are forgotten (with this notable exception), and no one today remembers the “Canal Street Plan,” which was all the oysters you can eat for 6 cents. (If you’re interested, read Mark Kurlansky’s fascinating book, The Big Oyster-much of the historic background of this article is both inspired and informed by his work.) It struck me that New York City had once been as notable for its native oysters as the city of New Orleans is currently, which-with its po’boys and loud beer bars serving giant, mild gulf oysters-is still an oyster town, while New York City is not. In the Spring 2022 issue of Edible Manhattan, I did a story on the Billion Oyster Project, which evolved into a deep dive into New York City’s historic oyster culture-of which there is a LOT. ![]()
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