Construction has begun on a new pier on Gowanus Bay, just south of the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn that will be used to attract ribbed mussels via a field of piles and woven web of "fuzzy rope.' SCAPE Landscape Architecture of New York City originally presented this "oyster-tecture" approach at MoMA's Rising Currents Exhibition in 2010.

In The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, author Mark Kurlansky recounts the history of the oyster trade in New York Harbor. Up until the early 1900s, oysters were New York City's "most celebrated export, a staple food for the wealthy, the poor, and tourists alike, and the primary natural defense against pollution for the city's congested waterways."

Currently there's a proposal by SCAPE Landscape Architecture of New York City to nurture oyster aquaculture cultivation in Brooklyn's Gowanus Bay, which is just south of Red Hook in the eastern upper bay of New York Harbor on the westernmost portion of Long Island. A 1.5 mile-long man-made canal extends northward from the bay. The idea, dubbed "oyster-tecture," is to create an artificial living reef "constructed from a field of piles and a woven web of "fuzzy rope' that supports oyster growth and builds a rich three-dimensional landscape mosaic."

The SCAPES initiative was first presented at MoMA's Rising Currents Exhibition in 2010. Several years later now, a small pilot project is underway to make that idea a reality. Construction has begun on a new pier that is to host the reef. The first step is to attach ropes to the pier, which should attract ribbed mussels, marine mollusks that better tolerate polluted waters than the oyster. All manner of shellfish (mollusks), like oysters or mussels, are nature's cleaner of waterways. A single oyster can filter about 50 gallons of water a day.

Regenerating the mollusk population in New York Harbor is not a new idea, of course. The Oyster Restoration Research Project has maintained a 30-foot long oyster reef in the Bronx River for seven years, and the Army Corps built an oyster reef off Governors Island, just north of Red Hook.