Canal Street, now a paved streambed channeling the steady inflow and outflow of new jersey traffic, was once home to small river. 

This small river, which swelled and shrank with the tides twice a day for 16,000 years, flowed inland from the Hudson,

then flooded the flat expanse of Lispenard's Meadow (land which is now known as tribeca),

and then finally, trickled downtown through a crevice between hillscapes (now both replaced by city hall and The Tombs)

to join forces with a small, placid glacial lake

(which was, in its time, the only still freshwater body of water in a many-mile radius.)

According to water historian Steve Duncan, the Canal Street stream was apparently large enough that prior to the European settlement, Lenape and other visitors from throughout the outer reaches of this region could canoe all the way from the Hudson, along the stream, and into the lake. 

The glacial lake, also fed tidally by a small rivulet that flowed from the East River, was only slightly smaller than Prospect Park Lake. On their sojourns inland to from the salty Hudson salt marshes, pre-apocalyptic people piled their canoes high with fresh oyster hauls, to then process and dry on long lines for the winter. The processing was done in Werpoes village, a permanent encampment on the banks of the placid water. Although the village was steadily visited by two separate clans (one hailing all the way from Washington Heights, and the other from Gowanus), its longhouses and ceremonial fires were also collectively tended by whoever happened to be passing through - leaving behind their own offerings to the land, the water, and the sandy soil at its lapping shores. 

Over time, the remains of these meals and offerings grew tall, great big iridescent piles towering above the water’s surface, visible for travelers as they edged upstream from the Big Rivers. 

Shell mounds, in contrast to any structure that exists today, served as skywatching scaffolding that rises *just* above the thick tree line, to take stock of who appears above the horizon every day and night: 

the moonrise,

 the sunset, 

  the great big scatter of stars whose stories cycle anew with every season,

      the variegated lights that race overhead after big summer downpours and particularly magnetic winters. 

According to Old Wells and Watercourses (1897), settlers working on behalf of the Dutch West India Corporation encountered such huge mounds of shells around the lake that they referred to it as "Kalch Hoek," meaning Shell Point - a name which was probably shifted into "Collect" in the later age of English rule. 

But in the ideology of extraction, a mound can’t be anything but trash. And thus, in spite of their great numbers throughout North and Central America, only a handful of shell mounds have been closely examined by archaeologists. In the years that have unfolded in the age of extraction, thousands upon thousands of mounds have been buried in the mad dash towards infrastructure. 

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as the apocalypse inched past its horizon point, settlements and their accompanying genocidal intent ripped through Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. All along eastern seaboard, shell mounds were repeatedly encountered, dismissed, and dismantled. In the imagination of extraction, after all, the only pile generated by human collective is one of trash. 

What remains of the Eastern mounds are their pearlescent remnants, scattered throughout the soil’s striae which marks those heady centuries of upheaval. They remain critically understudied as archaeological sites, and are still dismissed as waste facilities. The soils containing their stories are superimposed by structures which hold far too much value in the apocalyptic era to be upended by something as middling as a dig. 

One of Eastern Manhattan island’s most imposing shell mounds sites is memorialized with the name "Pearl Street". 

Within a century, the fish-filled pond that was once dotted with jutting mounds and fire heaps was surrounded by warehouse-sized factories which exclusively used the lake as a private cesspool for industrial waste; the tanneries, breweries, ropewalks, and slaughterhouses of the New era needed a constant supply of fresh water to keep the rot off of their factory floors.

In 1811, amidst a public health cry, Collect Pond was declared a “very stink and common sewer”, and filled with the blood-soaked earth leveled from the surrounding hillsides.  

And these heaps of soil, I believe, were almost certainly white-flecked with 

little

white

oyster 

shells 

xx