At Home - Bill Bryson [200]
In the 1790s, a heroic English immigrant named Benjamin Latrobe began a long campaign to clean up water supplies. Latrobe was in America only because of a personal misfortune. He had been a successful architect and engineer in England when, in 1793, his wife died in childbirth. Devastated, he decided to emigrate to America, his mother’s native country, to try to rebuild his life. For a time he was the only formally trained architect and engineer in the country, and as such he landed many important commissions, from the Bank of Pennsylvania building in Philadelphia to the new Capitol Building in Washington.
His principal preoccupation, however, was with the belief that dirty water was killing thousands of people unnecessarily. After a devastating outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, Latrobe persuaded the authorities to fill in the city swamps and bring in clean, fresh water from outside the city boundaries. The changes had a miraculous effect, and yellow fever never came back to Philadelphia with anything like the same force again. Latrobe took his efforts elsewhere and, ironically, while working in New Orleans in 1820, he contracted yellow fever himself and died.
Where cities failed to improve water supplies, heavy penalties were paid. Until about 1800, all Manhattan’s fresh water came from a single filthy pool—little more than a “common sewer,” in the words of one contemporary—in lower Manhattan known as the Collect Pond. But matters grew much worse as the population soared after the building of the Erie Canal. By the 1830s, it was estimated that a hundred tons of excrement were added to the city’s cesspits each day, often with contaminating effects on nearby wells. Water in New York was generally, and often visibly, polluted and undrinkable. New York in 1832 not only had a cholera epidemic, but also a yellow fever epidemic. Together they claimed more than four times as many victims as in Philadelphia with its cleaner water supplies. The dual outbreak acted as a spur to New York in much the way the Great Stink motivated London, and in 1837 work started on the Croton Aqueduct, which when finished in 1842 finally began to deliver clean, safe water to the city.
But where America was really ahead of the rest of the world was in the provision of private bathrooms. Here the main driver was not homeowners, but hotels. The very first hotel in the world to offer a bath for every bedroom was the Mount Vernon Hotel in the resort community of Cape May, New Jersey. This was in 1853 and was so far ahead of its time that over half a century passed before any other hotels offered such extravagance. Increasingly, however, bathrooms—albeit shared and down the corridor rather than private and in one’s room—became standard in hotels, first in the United States and then increasingly in Europe, and hoteliers who failed to heed this trend paid a hefty price.
Nowhere was that more memorably demonstrated than at the vast and otherwise glorious Midland Hotel at St. Pancras Station in London. Designed by the great George Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for the Albert Memorial, the Midland was intended to be the most magnificent hotel in the world when it opened in 1873. It cost the equivalent of $450 million in today’s money and was a wonder in almost every way. Unfortunately—in fact, amazingly—Scott provided just four bathrooms to be shared among six hundred bedrooms. Almost from the day of its opening, the hotel was a failure.
In private homes the provision of bathrooms was more hit-or-miss. Until quite late in the nineteenth century, many houses had plumbing to their kitchen and perhaps to a downstairs toilet, but lacked a proper bathroom because there wasn’t enough pressure in the pipes to get water upstairs. In Europe, even when pressure allowed, the rich proved unexpectedly reluctant to bring bathrooms into their lives. “Bathrooms are for servants,” sniffed one English aristocrat. Or as