Politics
It’s a Big Day for a Very Important Oyster
On National Oyster Day, the River Project celebrates a colossal oyster in New York Harbor.
Good morning. It’s Monday, and it’s National Oyster Day. We’ll celebrate by checking in on someone who can tell us a lot about the state of oysters in New York Harbor — without saying a word. We’ll also find out why congregants in a church in the East Village are shouting “Earthalujah!”
This large oyster, known as Big, tips the scales at nearly three pounds.Credit…Siddhartha Hayes/Hudson River Park Trust
Big is bigger than ever.
That is not a nonsense sentence. This is about Big, a New Yorker who has it good. Big lives rent-free in a splashy neighborhood where things are getting a bit crowded. Others are living on top of Big. Big is fine with that.
Big is an oyster, the largest found in New York Harbor in perhaps 100 years.
Big has been around since at least the 1990s, according to the people who know him the best. That makes Big a descendant of an older New York. But some say that Big is also a harbinger of the future: As Big goes, so goes the city, because Big’s health depends on water quality.
The River Project, a group that works to restore the Hudson, discovered Big in 2018 happily coupled to a piling in the water at Pier 40, near West Houston Street. Big weighed in at 876 grams, or just under two pounds.
Since then Big has become “a heavyweight champion, putting on the grams,” Carrie Roble, a vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust, which runs the River Project, said last week. Big now tips the scale at 1,286.5 grams, closing in on three pounds.
