Alameda on the Half Shell

Farming Oysters in the Island City


BY WOODY MINOR

In the late 19th century, when Bay Farm Island was truly an island of farms, its principal crop was asparagus, succulent spears that were the first to appear, in season, on the gold-rimmed plates of San Francisco gourmands. A popular sobriquet for this isolated outpost of the Island City was "Asparagus Island."
    But in the protected shallows along its north shore, including the placid waters of San Leandro Bay, Asparagus Island produced another crop in the late Victorian years, equally delectable and no less famous-oysters. Before pollution and silt drove them away, oyster companies cultivated extensive beds in the tidelands.
    The pioneer in this salty enterprise was Capt. J. J. Winant, who purchased 30 acres of submerged land near the Bay Farm Island Bridge in 1872. Acting as agent for the Washington Oyster Company, Winant planted the Alameda beds the following spring with oysters transported on his schooner B. F. Lee from Shoalwater Bay, on Puget Sound. By year's end, he was doing a brisk business shipping the mollusks by train and ferry to the San Francisco market.
    Other companies soon followed suit-Mulford Co., E. Terry & Co., Pacific Oyster Co. and Swanberg & West's Bay Farm Island Oyster Co. The most prominent of these "farmers" was the Morgan Oyster Co., a firm dating back to the Gold Rush, which controlled nearly 100 acres of
oyster beds in Alameda by the mid-1880s.
    The beds were fenced to keep out predatory stingrays, not to mention human predators-bands of "oyster pirates" who raided the beds on moonless nights, as well as gangs of hooligans hired by the companies to visit vandalism and theft upon their competitors. As a result, guards patrolled the beds by boat, armed with shotguns.
    In 1891, at the tender age of 15, Jack London joined a gang of pirates who caroused on the Oakland waterfront between raids on the oyster beds of Bay Farm Island. In his memoir John Barleycorn (1913), written several years before his death, London recalled his youthful adventures with evident nostalgia:

    I sought out French Frank, the oyster pirate, who wanted to sell his sloop, the Razzle Dazzle. I found him lying at anchor on the Alameda side of the estuary, near the Webster Street Bridge, with visitors aboard ... Tomorrow I would be an oyster pirate, as free a freebooter as the century and waters of San Francisco Bay would permit ... We would slack sheets, and on the first of the flood run down the bay to the Asparagus Islands, where we would anchor miles off shore ... I can never forget my thrills, the first night I took part in a concerted raid-rough men, big and unafraid, and weazened wharf rats, some of them ex-convicts, all of them enemies of the law and meriting jail, in sea-boots and sea-gear, talking in gruff, low voices ... There were the times I brought the Razzle Dazzle in with a bigger load of oysters than any other two-man craft; there was the time when we raided far down in Lower Bay and mine was the only craft back at daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island; there was the Thursday night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle Dazzle in without a rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the cream of the Friday morning trade.
    Whatever their provenance, Alameda oysters were not only coveted in San Francisco and Oakland, they also slipped down many a throat in the Island City. Some growers opened outlets on Park Street, "where orders may be left for any quantity, from a sack to a ton," reported the Encinal, the town newspaper. Local taverns and restaurants rode the faddish wave, their customers lining up to down oysters like dot-commers sucking up sushi.
    Nobmann's Saloon on Park Street, to cite one popular watering hole, served so many oysters one night "that we are afraid to name the amount, lest the incredulous might doubt our veracity," intoned the Encinal. The bivalves were judged to be "as sweet and toothsome as any taken from the parent beds in eastern waters."
    Capt. Winant's Park Street Baths, a short-lived bay-shore resort opened in 1880, offered "fresh oysters right from the beds." The editor of the town's newest newspaper, the Argus, lost no time discharging his journalistic duties: "Recently we sampled the oysters at Capt. Winant's pavilion, and found them to be lusty fellows. They were fresh, fat and gave a vigorous kick as they slipped down our throat."
    By the late 1880s, Alameda oysters were becoming tainted by pollution from the Pacific Oil Refinery, a forerunner of Standard Oil established in Alameda's West End in 1880. The beds were also being buried by mud from hydraulic mining operations in the Sierras. In the fall of 1887, the Morgan Oyster Co. pulled up stakes and transplanted its oysters to cleaner waters near Redwood City, and the last oyster farm in Alameda ceased operating in the early 1890s.
    For a few years, oysters could still be found in the old beds, and residents scavenged them by the boatful. "For the past several days oysters as big as your hand, if it is a big one, have been selling on Park Street for 20 cents a dozen," reported the Argus in 1893.
    Those were the days.

Read more about the pursuit
of Alameda oysters in
Taste of the Town