1766 Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn
Ratzer Maps showing Oyster Banks
1767 Ratzer Map of
Red Hook vs. Today
The Lenape people were Brooklyn’s original inhabitants. They called Long Island (including Brooklyn) Sewanhacka, meaning “island of shells.”
The Lenape created oyster middens (shell piles) all over NYC. These piles may have been used to engineer solid ground in marshy spaces, or to create conditions favorable to calcium-loving food plant species.
“On the way out we pass many Indian shell heaps bleached as white as snow...Some of them on the banks of the creek extend from fifteen to thirty feet upon the bank and under the water.”
-1839 diary entry from Brooklyn/Long Island resident Daniel Tredwell
“Boats crossing the bay were escorted by schools of playful whales, seals, and porpoises. Twelve-inch oysters and six-foot lobsters crowded offshore waters, and so many fish thrived in streams and ponds that they could be taken by hand. Woods and tidal marshlands teemed with bears, wolves, foxes, raccoons, otters, beavers, quail, partridge, forty-pound wild turkeys, doves ‘so numerous that the light can hardly be discerned where they fly,’ and countless deer ‘feeding, or gamboling or resting in the shades in full view.’ Wild swans were so plentiful ‘that the bays and shores where they resort appear as if they were dressed in white drapery.’...There are some persons who imagine that the animals of the country will be destroyed in time…but this is an unnecessary anxiety.”
1923 - South Ferry
Seafood and Oyster Stand
1937 - South Street and Pike Slip
Oyster Houses under the Manhattan Bridge
Reef in Florida at low tide
(likely what parts of New York Harbor would have looked like 400 years ago)