Producers · Issue 14
The last oyster shucker on Pier Nine
Forty years, one knife, and a pier that is about to become flats.
Arno Keel has opened roughly two million oysters. In March, the pier where he opened them closes for good.
Arno Keel arrives at Pier Nine at five, before the boats. He unlocks a steel shed the size of a garden bench, lights a gas ring for his coffee, and lays out the knife his father gave him in 1983. The blade is half as wide as it was.
"People think it is strength," he says, sliding the tip into the hinge of a rock oyster. "It is listening. The shell tells you where it wants to open."
For forty years the oysters have come from the same three families on the estuary. Keel opens them for four restaurants, a fishmonger and anyone who stops at the hatch with a coin. He does not own a phone. Orders arrive on paper, tucked under a stone on the counter.
In March the pier becomes a building site. The flats will have a view of the water and, according to the brochure, a "seafood concept". Nobody has asked Keel to run it.
"People think it is strength," he says, sliding the tip into the hinge of a rock oyster. "It is listening. The shell tells you where it wants to open."
For forty years the oysters have come from the same three families on the estuary. Keel opens them for four restaurants, a fishmonger and anyone who stops at the hatch with a coin. He does not own a phone. Orders arrive on paper, tucked under a stone on the counter.
In March the pier becomes a building site. The flats will have a view of the water and, according to the brochure, a "seafood concept". Nobody has asked Keel to run it.
“The shell tells you where it wants to open. You only have to wait for it.”
Photographs
Afterwards
We went back the week the hoardings went up. The shed was gone, but a stone still sat on the concrete where the counter used to be, with an order tucked under it. Somebody had not heard.
Keel now opens oysters two mornings a week at a restaurant across the harbour. He says the light is worse and the coffee better.
Keel now opens oysters two mornings a week at a restaurant across the harbour. He says the light is worse and the coffee better.
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