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Billion Oyster Project workers place oysters in the water from a pier at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City in August 2020.
Billion Oyster Project workers place oysters in the water from a pier at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City in August 2020. Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP
Billion Oyster Project workers place oysters in the water from a pier at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City in August 2020. Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP

Can oysters save New York City from the next big storm?

This article is more than 2 years old

A new project aims to shore up the disappearing coastline of New York City’s Staten Island, while reviving a once famously thriving oyster population

On a recent Saturday afternoon, diners at the Brooklyn restaurant Grand Army slurped oysters drizzled in mignonette and lemon juice against a soundtrack of hip-hop classics and funk. Unbeknown to many of them, they were also supporting a new effort to use oyster shells as building blocks for new, living coastal reefs – a transformative use that’s not only restorative, but may also help protect the city from climate change.

Grand Army is one of dozens of restaurants in the city donating its oyster shells to support restoration projects like Living Breakwaters, a $107m effort to shore up the disappearing coastline of New York City’s Staten Island.

The project will consist of nearly a half-mile of partially submerged breakwaters, strategically covered in recycled oyster reefs. As those reefs grow, the project’s designers hope they will help control flooding and coastal erosion while providing new habitat for abundant aquatic life.

An oyster at Grand Army, a Brooklyn restaurant partnering with the Billion Oyster Project. Photograph: Clark Mindock

In a sense, Living Breakwaters is an attempt to reimagine the relationship between humans and nature in one of the world’s most heavily engineered harbors. It is a departure from so-called gray infrastructure like dikes, seawalls and dams – the tools that largely define New York’s efforts to control flooding.

Instead, the project is designed to protect the city by harnessing the power of the very natural systems that have been all but destroyed by environmental degradation – and reviving them in the process.

For thousands of years, oysters played a special role in the story of New York. Once a staple of the Lenape people’s diet, oysters led European visitors later to write home in wonder of their quality, and colonizers turned them into a major industry – ultimately devastating local oyster populations through pollution and overconsumption.

“We have been living in this world where nature has existed sort of as a backdrop,” said landscape architect Kate Orff, whose design firm Scape conceived of the Living Breakwaters project. “But that background is no longer there, it’s in a state of collapse. We have to foreground the notion of rebuilding natural systems right now otherwise we will not have this bridge to the future.”

Living Breakwaters broke ground in September, installing bedding stone and marine mattresses on the seafloor off Staten Island. It is the product of seven years of planning, permitting and testing that was started in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, a devastating storm in 2012 that leveled homes, tore up boardwalks and spurred a federal funding windfall to rebuild, with Congress allocating $17bn for New York City alone. The project is premised on the idea that adequately meeting the challenges of climate change-induced sea level rise and increasingly vicious storms requires building with nature, not just alongside or against it.

A 19th-century illustration of the Staten Island oyster industry.
Illustration: Alamy

Building with oysters is an example of this so-called green infrastructure approach. When attached to rocks and other structures in water, the bivalves can help make them resilient to pounding waves. They are also efficient water filters – a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day, sucking out pollution and excess nutrients, and enhancing water quality.

‘It was a nightmare’

Sandy ripped into the New York metro area just under a decade ago, pushing swells not only on to the streets of lower Manhattan – where neighborhoods went dark for days amid the flooding – but also straight into Staten Island, where single-family homes are built right up on the water. The storm, a massive event that affected 24 states, caused an estimated $19bn in damage and killed 44 people in New York City alone.

Twenty-four people died in Staten Island during the storm, including two in Tottenville, the neighborhood where Living Breakwaters is being constructed. Gerard Spero lost his brother-in-law and 13-year-old niece, George and Angela Dresch, in the storm, which ripped their house off its foundation.

“The only thing that was left was the front steps and the hole for the basement,” said Spero. “It was a nightmare. A total nightmare.”

Aerial views of Staten Island destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, in November 2012. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy

In response to Sandy, the local and federal government poured money into fortifying the coast. Last year, New York started construction on a $1.4bn project to bolster defenses on Manhattan’s east side through a series of raised parklands, floodwalls, berms and movable gates. But some wondered how green infrastructure solutions, which are inherently regenerative and thus considered cost effective compared with more traditional projects, could help.

To find those projects, Shaun Donovan, who led the federal government’s long-term Sandy recovery and was then the secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud), said the agency launched a competition called Rebuild by Design, inspired by efforts in Amsterdam to bolster its considerable gray infrastructure apparatus through nature-based solutions to high-water management.

Living Breakwaters – which took lessons from Louisiana, where oyster reefs have been installed in lakes and bayous for over a century – presented an opportunity to test out nature-based defenses hundreds of feet off the coast of America’s largest city.

“One of the things about a crisis the scale of Sandy is, essentially, when it’s a 100-year storm, nobody’s alive that’s seen an example of it, right?” Donovan said. “What any place, even a place as sophisticated and innovative as New York needs to really do, is look at what’s happening around the globe, bring the best thinkers, and almost invent new solutions.”


On a recent winter morning as Living Breakwaters got to work installing armor stone on the marine mattresses near Staten Island, Danielle Bissett, the director of restoration for the Billion Oyster Project, boarded a ferry in lower Manhattan and rode it across the East River to Governors Island. Bissett is in charge of helping to revive New York Harbor’s oyster population by literally incubating a billion oyster larvae on used shells from restaurants across the city.

Shells are placed in super trays on Governors Island – temporary reef structures that can be suspended under docks and act as nurseries where oyster larvae can grow. Photograph: Clark Mindock

That restoration is necessary as a result of two centuries of dredging by the US army corps of engineers, and the accompanying industrial waste and raw sewage that made its way freely into the city’s waterways before state and federal reforms in the 1960s and 1970s slowly started improving water quality. While dredging helped turn the city into an economic powerhouse, it also decimated places like the Buttermilk Channel, a small waterway once home to oysters and tide pools that was shallow enough at low tide for people to cross by foot from Brooklyn to Governors Island, where Bissett’s office is today. The channel now is deep enough for cruise ships.

The shells that will become oysters again are stored in 10ft mounds on the island, brought over on a big box truck from city restaurants. The piles are reminiscent of much older oyster shell piles known as middens left behind by the Lenape and other indigenous people long before Henry Hudson and his half-Dutch, half-British crew of 16 sailed into New York Harbor in 1609. Lower Manhattan’s Pearl Street was named after one such midden.

Oyster shells brought from city restaurants are stacked on Governors Island for the curing process. They are left for a year to be ‘cleaned’ by sunshine, bugs, rain and other natural processes before oyster larvae are introduced. Photograph: Clark Mindock

Once the ongoing foundational work on the Living Breakwaters is completed in 2024, Bissett and her colleagues will get to work on seeding the stone breakwaters with larvae-laden shells. The Billion Oyster Project, which launched in 2014 with the goal of restoring one billion oysters in New York Harbor by 2035, is hoping this year to hit the 100m oyster milestone – the number of oysters implanted with larvae and “installed” in various areas in the harbor.

“If we don’t intervene and help it’s tough for nature to get a foothold,” she said. “The most exciting part of all of this is it’s not just oysters. It’s wetlands. It’s the intertidal zone and that rehabilitation. It’s water quality.”

For Staten Island’s coast, that rehabilitation may find its roots on pebble ice with a helping of cocktail sauce.

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