From time to time we’ve touched on the topic of oysters in the Gowanus. We think they, and the Gowanus Oyster Stewards, are fascinating. Our oyster friends get some space in the New York Press this week, so we though we’d share a bit:

“Oysters are native to the Gowanus,” explains Katie Mosher-Smith, a young Vermont native and mother of two who now lives in the neighborhood. She’s also the program director for the Gowanus Oyster Stewards. “They’re native to all of the East Coast. In fact, the Gowanus had tons of oysters—food for the rich and food for the poor. They were big back then—the size of dinner plates, it’s said.” According to Mosher-Smith, when the Gowanus was a navigable channel, the oysters would clean the water and formed an ecosystem, like building reefs, that provided natural filtration. “But all the harvesting and the dredging kind of wiped out the oysters,” she explains. She says it will take a “hybridization of remediation” to clean up Gowanus and other bodies of water like it, but history has taught us that oysters are cheap and effective labor.

Mosher-Smith coordinates a cadre of neighborhood residents who come down to this stretch of the Gowanus Canal most Saturday afternoons to haul out their oyster nets and count, measure and clean the oyster population. Sitting around with this earnest group of urban environmentalists, scrubbing shellfish and learning about the seals that used to navigate this stretch of water and the squatters and gentrifiers that do now, the experience is a combo of a day at the dog park, an afternoon planting trees and a symposium on the evolution of Brooklyn.

You can check out the Gowanus Oyster Garden Stewards blog here. It has links to more Gowanus info.

Related Posts:
Gowanus Oyster Gardening
Check Out the Gowanus Oysters