BEFORE it was the Big Apple, New York was the big oyster, at a time American oysters were known for their size. A dubious endorsement came from the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote that eating an American oyster was like eating a baby.

New York was for several centuries one of the world's oyster centers. New York oysters were said to be less perishable, oysters that knew how to take it. In the 19th century, when Europe and America were in the throes of an oyster craze, more oysters were shipped abroad from New York than from any other American port.

In 1626, when Peter Minuit made the first New York real estate killing, buying Manhattan for a reputed $24, he had the clearheadedness also to buy the oyster grounds, Oyster Island. (It was renamed Ellis Island in 1770.)

By 1664, when the British took Manhattan, oystering was an important New York industry and soon came under regulation. A 1679 ordinance restricted to 10 the number of oyster boats in the Great South Bay of Long Island. Despite such regulations, many prominent New York oyster beds, including those of Staten Island, were stripped in the 18th and early 19th century.

But New York is a city where rapacious shortsightedness has always been the mother of invention. After destroying the oyster beds, 19th-century New Yorkers were among the pioneers in the cultivation of oysters. It was discovered that oysters in the larval stage, often taken from Connecticut or the Chesapeake, deposited in suitable beds, would attach a foot and grow.

New York oysters, like so much in New York, were not really bigger, just better marketed. As with many marine species, warmer waters promote growth. According to John Kochiss, in ''Oystering From New York to Boston,'' it takes a Long Island oyster four to five years to grow to the same marketable size that a Gulf of Mexico oyster reaches in only two years.

Different New York oysters had their turn as stars, and in 1827 it was the Saddle Rock's moment. These enormous oysters were found at the base of a 20-foot-high rock in the East River and became so popular that within 10 years there were none left.

The most famous New York oyster, the blue point, is not large. Its name is derived not from appearance but from its town of origin on Long Island. The diminutive blue point was celebrated for its white flesh and round shape, and by the mid-19th century all of the Great South Bay produced blue points.

The British imported many blue points as well as ''East Rivers'' and Staten Island ''sounds.'' Other New York oysters enjoyed international reputations. Some were near Nyack, others by City Island, still others from Jamaica Bay, like Rockaways and Jamaicans. There were even, until the early 20th century, a number of Manhattan oysters. Flushing Bay, by what is now La Guardia Airport, was a major oyster area.


Many New Yorkers were not happy. Local dairy producers panicked as the Erie Railroad brought three million quarts of milk into New York in 1842. By 1849 milk imports were up to nine million. But oyster producers were thrilled to see their perishable shellfish speeded to Buffalo and points west.

While blue points now sell for $1.45 each at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, oysters in the 19th century were so abundant that they fed both rich and poor. An Englishmen named Charles MacKay, visiting the United States in 1857, observed that the only class difference in America was between the people who had Champagne with their oysters and those who washed them down with beer.

Americans, especially New Yorkers, loved oysters. They were pickled, fried, stewed and used in sauces. Copious quantities were involved: a single serving of oyster stew contained dozens of oysters. Amelia Simmons's cookbook, published in Albany in 1796 and considered the first American cookbook, gives instructions ''To Smother a Fowl in Oysters,'' which seems not the worst fate a bird has been known to suffer.

But the favorite way of eating oysters in New York and the Northeast was raw. In 19th-century New York, oysters were opened and served raw with nothing but pepper, salt, lemon juice or vinegar. They were offered in bars, at street markets, in hotels and at streetside stands.

THE oyster cellar became as New York an institution as the papaya bar; the earliest record is from 1783, when one opened on Broad Street. The cellars were usually a few steps below street level, and advertised with an ''oyster balloon'' by the stairwell. These ''balloons,'' red muslin globes, were lighted at night, usually until late.

In 1842, when Charles Dickens, author of the phrase ''solitary as an oyster,'' visited New York, he seemed unimpressed by the food, including a dozen-course feast in his honor at Delmonico's that began with oysters. But in spite of his later assertion that Americans ate ''piles of indigestible matter'' (strong language from a man whose wife made suet dumplings) he was taken with New York's oyster cellars.

Most of the cellars were known for their rough clientele, though there were exceptions, like Downing's on Broad Street, which catered to bankers. Dickens went to the Five Points, the infamous slum near Worth and Baxter Streets, where the cellars were interspersed with sleazy dance halls.

George G. Foster, a reporter for The New York Tribune who described oyster cellars in his 1850 book, ''New York by Gaslight,'' wrote, ''The women, of course, are all of the same kind; but among the men, you would find, if you looked curiously, reverend judges and juvenile delinquents, pious and devout hypocrites, and undisguised libertines and debauchees.''

Down a small set of stairs would be a swinging saloon door leading to a room with a bar at one end and booths at the other. Sometimes private rooms were available in the back. After midcentury the décor started to become gaudier, with ornate light fixtures, red velour curtains and, sometimes, vaguely erotic paintings on the walls.

In the mid-19th century, Canal Street was a center for oyster cellars, and the widely adopted Canal Street Plan was all you can eat for 6 cents. It was rumored that cellar proprietors preserved profits by slipping a bad oyster to customers who were eating too many. Still, customers ate several dozen at a 6-cent sitting, making the millions of dollars' worth of oyster -- $6 million in 1850 alone, according to Michael and Ariane Batterberry's ''On the Town in New York'' -- all the more impressive.

Diamond Jim Brady, the legendary New York gourmand, famously began his pretheater dinner with three dozen oysters. New York oysters were not big enough for him (he had huge Lynnhaven oysters specially ordered from Maryland).

In the mid-19th century, floating oyster markets were built that could tie up along the Hudson and East Rivers. By the 1880's the barges had become two stories high, with elaborate ornaments.

Oyster cellars vanished late in the century when the New York beds were vanishing from overuse and pollution. In the 1920's, outbreaks of typhoid were linked to New York oysters, and in 1927 New York Harbor and the waters around Staten Island were condemned for oyster cultivation because of pollution. Today the oyster, like the cod in Boston, stands as a symbol of what New York once was and what has been lost.

Photos: Blue points were six for a dime in 1937 at a stand at Washington and Fulton Streets. Below, ''On the Half-Shell.'' (Culver Pictures, above and below)