Names of New York by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Author:Joshua Jelly-Schapiro [Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

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PALMER’S NEW PROPERTY WAS called Minneford’s Island at the time: It was a part of the larger parcel that Thomas Pell acquired from the Siwanoy sachem, Minneford, a century before. Palmer’s vision for the place, which was home to only a few hearty farmers and oystermen, was to build a seaport here to rival Manhattan. His island did thrive as a home to shipwrights who still make world-class yachts in its yards, but it never became a commercial center of the sort the word “city” implies. One nonetheless wonders if its name (which lost its “new” at some point) may have played at least a subconscious role in its citizens’ vote to have their island, which until 1896 was part of Pelham, in Westchester County, become a part of New York City instead.

Also key to that decision was a promise from politicians in faraway Manhattan. They told City Islanders that if they defected from Westchester for New York City, the Department of Transportation would build them a bridge to the Bronx. Thus was City Island made a part of greater Gotham in 1898 and joined to its mainland by a permanent link that’s now jammed, on summer days, with cars and livery cabs inching onto City Island Avenue. Up and down the island’s main drag, people tumble from those cars into one of the thirty seafood restaurants that sling frozen drinks and crab legs and fried shrimp by the pound and have become City Island’s raison d’être (at least to other Bronxites).

These restaurants recall the maritime past of a onetime fishing village whose nickname for its native-born is still “clamdiggers” (non-natives are called “musselsuckers”), but whose urban present is underscored by the truth that none of its eateries, today, serves any food from the water they overlook. Shellfish from any of greater New York’s waters were long ago deemed unsafe, on account of the PCBs absorbed in their flesh, by the state Department of Health. Every lobster or fried clam dished up at Johnny’s Reef or the City Island Lobster House gets here by the same route those joints’ patrons do: by crossing the causeway, on a truck. But this hardly matters to the loyal diners who hang a quick left off the bridge to head toward the Lobster House’s beckoning red roof, which was adorned until 2012 with a giant lobster that the place’s owner, Jojo Mandarino, called Larry.

Sadly, Larry the Lobster was badly damaged in Superstorm Sandy (“We had to chop him up,” Manzarano told the Bronx Times), and he’s now left his perch above a parking lot that smells of the sea and of garlic. But the free garlic bread inside is delicious. And so is the general ambience at a place where happy patrons in plastic bibs—whether couples celebrating anniversaries, hustlers a big score, families a niece’s graduation or a patriarch’s birthday—tuck into the sort of portions, washed down with boozy glasses of City Island Iced Tea (“watch out!” the menu warns), that you’d never find at a place catering to the rich.

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