It’s the Biggest Oyster Found in New York in 100 Years. And It Has Stories to Tell.

NEW YORK — It has people, and its people call it Big. And doesn’t everyone who is fawned over and photographed like a celebrity have people?

Not Mr. Big, as in “Sex and the City,” or Big Daddy or Big Mama, as in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” And not Biggie, like Biggie Smalls, the Notorious BIG.

Just Big.

Big’s people rave that it is a record-setter, the largest oyster found in New York Harbor in perhaps 100 years. Big’s people, from the River Project, a group that works to restore the Hudson River Estuary, had to buy a scale big enough to weigh it. The one they had when Big arrived was too small for the job.

Big tipped the new scale at 876 grams, or 1.93 pounds, which was a big letdown. Big’s people had taken it for a 2-pounder.

They also measured Big. It is 22 centimeters long, or 8.66 inches, about 1 inch longer than one found last year but smaller than the foot-long oysters that once called New York Harbor home.

For years, naturalists have been installing artificial reefs in the harbor for oysters to live on, but Big was not a farm-raised baby transplanted to a reef. Big was a native who grew up on a piling in the River Project’s front yard, the wide water at Pier 40, just beyond West Houston Street. And Big has a lot in common with its hometown.

Consider: The city’s population keeps climbing, to an estimated 8.6 million in 2017. Big’s people say Big’s population is growing, too. Big’s inhabitants are barnacles and worms and sponges. What New Yorker hasn’t been called at least one of those?

Like the city, Big has been through a lot, its surface pockmarked and ragged. Big has its expressways and its odd little dead-ends.

The city is always tearing itself down and building itself up again. Big goes through a similar process, but without bulldozers, cranes or workers in hard hats.

“Oysters settle on other oysters — historically, it was the dead shells that would serve as the base for the next generation,” said Mark Siddall, who described himself as “curator of wormy, slimy stuff” at the American Museum of Natural History. “That’s absolutely the story of New York, where new generations and new people build upon the remains of what was left behind.”

So Big is a metaphor for New York City itself — which, as author Mark Kurlansky explained in his 2006 book, “The Big Oyster,” had another nickname before it was the Big Apple. By some accounts, in the 17th century, New York Harbor held half of the world’s oysters. The city was filled with oyster stands before there were hot-dog stands or food trucks. A 12-course dinner in 1842 for Charles Dickens — who characterized old Ebenezer Scrooge as being as “secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster” — began with oysters, glorious oysters.

Big is a New Yorker, which means that Big is a survivor. Big survived being pried loose by a diver with the construction crew repairing Pier 40. Big’s people say dislodging an oyster is difficult; oysters attach themselves to objects underwater with cementlike inviolability. What happened to Big must have been traumatic, but was also its salvation. The construction workers “knew if they let it fall to the mud on the bottom, it wouldn’t survive,” said Toland Kister of the River Project.

The workers also knew Big wouldn’t survive the rest of the project, which will involve, in effect, power-washing the pilings and encasing them in cement, Kister said.

“It’s not as if people are diving down there to look for oysters all the time,” Kister said. “These were construction workers with a job to do, and it’s not research.”

Big’s people consider Big special, but they hope Big is not too special. “This oyster could be unique,” Kister said. “It could be the only oyster that was down there like this, but it would also be really, really cool if it wasn’t the unique thing down under there.”

Siddall said Big brought to mind oysters the size of dinner plates that were harvested from the Gowanus Creek in Brooklyn from the 1600s to the time of the Revolutionary War. “There was some dredging that was permitted in the late 1700s,” he said, “and after the dredging, the oysters were still abundant, but they were smaller.”

He paused, as if debating whether to try an obvious joke. He did not resist the temptation.

“You may have big oysters in the Gowanus now, but it might be because of mutants,” he said. The Gowanus Creek was transformed into the Gowanus Canal in the mid-19th century, and the canal is now a notorious Superfund site, described by the Environmental Protection Agency as “one of the nation’s most seriously contaminated water bodies.”

The city’s oyster beds were closed in the 1920s, after a typhoid scare brought on by raw sewage in the harbor. And while Big’s people see Big as a sign that the Hudson is cleaner and healthier than it once was, no one is going to eat Big. Oysters take in water, like a filtration system. “They’re like the liver of New York Harbor, and we need a healthy liver,” Siddall said.

So how old is Big? Kister said the oyster could have been living on its piling for seven to 15 years — “which is a big spread."

Siddall, after looking at photographs of Big online, said that 15 was probably on the low side. “I’m prepared to be more liberal in my estimate,” he said. “It’s probably twice that age.”

But Big could be even older, Siddall said.

“I was born in 1966,” he said, “so it could be as old as me, and I’d like to think that it is. It would be really reassuring if that were true, for both of us.”