Image: NY Public Library

In the decades before the Civil War, Thomas Downing, the son of slaves, became the acknowledged oyster king of New York City when New York was the oyster capital of the known universe.  He had learned how to rake oysters as a child on Chincoteague Island, Virginia. When he moved to New York in 1819 at the age of 28, he became an oysterman. 

There were hundreds of oyster cellars in New York City at the time, many associated with working-class bars, dance halls, and brothels. Oysters were plentiful, cheap, and thought of as a food of the lower classes.

Thomas Downing helped to change that perception, when he opened his own oyster cellar at 5 Broad Street, in the heart of the financial district, in 1825.  The restaurant was elegantly appointed with damask curtains, gold-leaf carvings, chandeliers and mirrored hallways. Stockbrokers, attorneys, politicians, and other of the city’s elites ate raw, fried, or stewed oysters, oyster pie, fish with oyster sauce, or poached turkey stuffed with oysters.

Downing also catered events and exported oysters internationally. He catered the banquet to welcome Charles Dickens to New York that was attended by 3,000 New Yorkers. Downing shipped oysters to Queen Victoria who showed her gratitude by sending him a gold chronometer watch in appreciation.

Thomas Downing became wealthy serving the white establishment of New York. He expanded his restaurant by taking over cellars on either side of his original space. While blacks may not have dined in the restaurant, there was another side to his operations. The basement of Thomas Downing’s Oyster House was a major stop on the antebellum Underground Railroad, where runaway blacks could seek shelter from slave catchers and be helped to arrange passage to Canada or to disappear into the City of New York.

Downing helped found an all-black United Anti-Slavery Society of the City of New York in 1836. He also worked to improve education for black children in the African Free Schools and championed equal voting rights for every citizen, irrespective of color. Downing’s son, George, would follow in his footsteps as both a restauranteur and an abolitionist leader.  

Thomas Downing died in 1866 at the age of 75. Downing’s wake was reported by The New York Times in stirring detail, from the “long line of carriages, well filled with mourners” to multiple delegations of Freemasons “in full regalia.” Crowds thronged the streets in front of a church that was packed from its doors to its pulpit, waiting for a chance to view “for the last time the face of him who was well known to all.”

On the day of his funeral, the New York Chamber of Commerce closed its doors so members could attend the services.

While Thomas Downing was uniquely successful, there were many free blacks in the New York oyster business before the Civil War. By 1810, the majority of oystermen registered in New York were free blacks. In the late 1820s, free blacks established Sandy Ground, which is now the oldest continuously inhabited free black settlement in the United States. They supported themselves largely through oystering. The second of two Staten Island ferries currently under construction will be named Sandy Ground.