The Lobsters

Now that we know there was definitely a decline in oysters because of environmental, political and cultural changes, were these circumstances also applied to other shellfishes from the New York harbor during this time? Next in our narrative, we choose to investigate lobsters (a la newburg, or a l'americaine) that were extracted from the database to compare with the trends found with oysters. This has not yet been executed in prior literature. Let's see what our visualizations tell us!

NUMBER OF AMERICAN LOBSTERS IN NYC

This graph displays the total lobster dish count throughout the years from 1894 to 1970. This was created with Tableau.

This visualization depicts the amount of American Lobster dishes being served in New York from 1894 to 1970. Similar to our visualizations of Blue Point Oysters, this graph indicates a decline of lobsters while also showing lobsters’ ebb and flow with sales in a market setting. From the peak in 1900 (41,720), the sum of dish count per year began to constantly decrease.

However, the second peak of American Lobsters is flipped with that of the blue points. For instance, the second peak is higher than the first for Blue Point Oysters, but on the Lobster visualization, we see that the first peak was much larger.

Photograph Courtesy of Wikipedia

Admittedly, there are limitations to this visualization since we only decided to extract American Lobsters (a La Newburg or American style) from our dataset. We assumed that lobster a la newburg (which frequently appeared in the database) was directly extracted from the New York harbor as well. However we must note that these extractions may not necessarily mean that they were harvested in the New York Harbor -- they may have been imported from elsewhere, which could have caused an inaccuracy in our visualization to a certain degree.

Nonetheless, by comparing the decline of American Lobsters to that of oysters, we found their statistically significant similarity along the years. Thus, it is highly possible that the increasing dumping of toxic waste into the New York Harbor also had similar impacts on the population of American Lobsters -- they were being sold less. This could possibly be generalized to all shellfishes in the New York harbor.