WELCOMING COMMITTEE:

Millions of Ellis Island immigrants entered New York City expecting to find streets "paved with gold." They found them piled with oyster shells instead.

It's difficult to overstate just how significant oysters once were to life in New York -- it took nonfiction writer Mark Kurlanksky 325 pages to get the point across in his book The Big Oyster -- but one jaw-dropping statistic should put the relationship into perspective: at the beginning of the 17th century, half of the world's oyster population could be found in New York Harbor.

Oysters carts were the original hot dog stands. A few pennies could buy you a dozen. New Yorkers ate them in designated oyster cellars, exported them across the planet and even burned them down (mixing them with sand and water) to build walls of "tabby concrete." During Gilded Gotham's peak, when the ragged and the rich rarely crossed paths, oysters were an equalizer. Everyone ate them.

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