Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll get an update on the biggest oyster found in New York Harbor in perhaps 100 years and what its apparent good health says about how clean the Hudson River is now. We’ll also get details on the first stop on Zohran Mamdani’s five-borough tour of the city.
It’s time for Big thoughts. That capital B was not a typo. It’s the name of an oyster. Not just any oyster, but the biggest oyster found in New York waters in perhaps 100 years, according to the Hudson River Park Trust’s River Project, which works to restore the Hudson estuary. How big is Big? So big that when it turned up, the River Project had to get a bigger scale. At its most recent weigh-in 10 days ago, it turned out that Big had slimmed down since last year. The readout was 1,192 grams, or 2.63 pounds, down from just over 2.8 pounds a year ago. Big weighed 1.93 pounds when the River Project found it in 2018. Since then, Big’s fans have cast this unprepossessing creature as a metaphor for New York, which has a long history with oysters. And like the city, Big is a hub of high-density housing. At last count, two other oysters, 41 ribbed mussels and more than four dozen barnacles were making a home on Big’s ragged, pockmarked shell. Tina Walsh, an assistant vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust, said she was not sure when the first of those hangers-on had bound themselves to Big. It probably happened after Big was moved from where it had grown up, attached to a pier that was being rebuilt. “We could guess that was somewhere a bit darker and shadier” than the spot Big has occupied ever since. More sunlight could reach Big’s new neighborhood. There could be more food there, too, she said. When New York was oyster cityBig serves as a reminder that oysters were once everywhere in New York. By some accounts, half the oysters in the world once resided in New York Harbor. The Dutch settlers of the 17th century named two islands in the Hudson Great Oyster Island and Little Oyster Island. We know them as Liberty Island and Ellis Island. But the oyster beds in the Hudson did not yield what the Dutch wanted most: pearls. New York oysters do not make pearls fit for necklaces or earrings. The oysters of New York were a different kind of delicacy, tasty and plentiful. The quantities of oysters harvested from the Hudson were stunning. In 1860, some 12 million oysters were sold in markets in New York; 20 years later, the oyster beds were giving up 700 million a year. But industrialization — and pollution from sewers that overflowed in heavy storms — doomed the oyster business. The city ordered the oyster beds in the Hudson closed in the 1920s after a typhoid scare brought on by raw sewage in the harbor. And while Big’s people see Big’s longevity as a sign that the Hudson is cleaner than it used to be, Big will not end up on anyone’s plate. Oysters take in water, like a filtration system. Too much undrinkable water has passed over Big’s gills in the 20 or so years it has been alive. Environmental groups have worked for years to bring back the oyster population, stocking artificial reefs with baby oysters. Walsh said that more than 35 million juvenile oysters now inhabit the Hudson River Park’s 400-acre estuarine sanctuary. In all, more than 150 million are thriving in New York Harbor, thanks to restoration efforts. As for Big, not all the news was upbeat. An oyster that was growing on Big died mysteriously since last year. “It could have been eaten,” Walsh said, or maybe there wasn’t enough nourishment. The dead oyster apparently accounted for Big’s weight drop in the last year. “It was a pretty sizable adult oyster, but it says something that even as one oyster died, even more oysters settled on Big in the time that one oyster was still growing,” she said. Big’s caretakers left the shell from the dead oyster where it was, because pulling it off could hurt Big and disrupt the lives of the other organisms that have attached themselves to Big. And it can have a useful afterlife. “Even when dead, it can be a substance for other oysters to grow on,” Walsh said. “Maybe something will have grown right on top of it next time we look at it.” WEATHER Today will be sunny with temperatures nearing 90. The night will be mostly clear with a low around 74. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Friday (Feast of the Assumption). The latest New York news
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Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor, is on a borough-by-borough tour of the city this week to spotlight ways he believes President Trump’s agenda hurts the city. He started in Manhattan, saying that Trump was responsible for pushing more than one million New Yorkers off Medicaid, cutting funding for food stamps and slashing funding for housing programs. “We know that there is no borough that will be free from Trump’s cruelty,” he said. Mamdani criticized former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani in June. Mamdani argued that Mr. Cuomo’s recent phone call with Trump about the race was “disqualifying” and said that his two other main challengers — Mayor Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee — also have ties to the president. Mr. Cuomo denies discussing the campaign with the president. Mamdani’s Manhattan stop on Monday was held at the headquarters for Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed him, and included endorsements from three Democrats: Ruth Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president; Keith Powers, a City Council member; and Harvey Epstein, a state assemblyman. But some prominent New York Democrats have not embraced Mamdani since the primary, among them Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, the House minority leader. METROPOLITAN DIARY Fair trade
Dear Diary: After picking up some groceries at Trader Joe’s on a muggy Saturday morning, I got on the uptown 6 at Union Square carrying three bags packed with provisions. The train trundled north, and when we got to the 33rd Street stop, a man got on with two similarly overfilled Trader Joe’s bags. He was standing close to where I was sitting, and I noticed that he was texting frantically. After a few minutes, he looked at me. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’m sorry, I know this is kind of weird, but do you happen to have an onion by any chance?” I did. “My girlfriend sent me several texts to remind me to buy one, but I totally forgot,” he said. “And she’s going to kill me if I don’t have one for a bagel brunch we’re hosting this morning.” A passenger next to us started to laugh. “If you don’t mind giving me the onion, you’re welcome to take the bananas or whatever you want,” the man with the Trader Joe’s bags said. So there we were at 68th Street, completing an impromptu grocery exchange on a New York City subway car. “Thanks, man,” he said before getting off at the next stop. “You totally saved my day.” — Lala Tanmoy Das Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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