Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [154]
The council proved much less attentive to the sanitation problems created by steady population growth and overcrowding. After ten P.M., householders and servants were allowed to empty ordure tubs of human waste into the rivers, where it coated the wharves and quays with a fecal slime. A storm sewer under Broad Street, reinforced with stone in 1747, was designed to drain into the East River, but even with the addition of trunk lines in Wall Street and elsewhere, it never functioned properly, and pools of rank, debris-filled water were a frequent challenge to pedestrians. Although residents complained loudly about the appalling stench and clouds of flies that blanketed the city as a result— a hot day in summer could be almost unbearable—the Common Council seemed unwilling or unable to act.
Nor did it cope effectively with the increase of crime that accompanied the city’s new prosperity after 1750. Prostitution, for example, had been relatively unobtrusive in New York as late as 1744, when Dr. Hamilton learned that an after-dusk stroll on the Battery “was a good way for a stranger to fit himself with a courtezan; for that place was the generall rendezvous of the fair sex of that profession after sunset.” The mass arrival of troops and privateers prompted more aggressive and organized approaches to commercial sex—bolder women venturing out to board ships at anchor in the harbor, others setting up “Houses of 111 Repute” in town. Raids on these establishments in July 1753 netted twenty-two “ladies of Pleasure,” five of whom received fifteen lashes before “a vast Number of Spectators” and were then banished. These measures were utterly ineffectual, though, and prostitution became a more and more conspicuous element of the city scene in the years that followed.
So did assault, mugging, robbery, and other crimes against persons and property, which residents blamed on the influx of disreputable outsiders like the “Gang of Fellows of no good Aspect” who arrived one day on the stage from Philadelphia. As early as 1749 one local paper reported that it had “become dangerous for the good People of this City, to be out late at Nights, without being sufficiently strong or well armed,” and half a dozen years later the printer Hugh Gaine estimated that at least one house in New York was burgled every night. The unpaid citizen watch, consisting chiefly of residents who couldn’t afford to buy their way out of obligatory service, was useless—a “Parcel of idle, drunken, vigilant Snorers, who never quelled any nocturnal Tumult in their lives,” the Gazette scoffed in 1757, “but would, perhaps, be as ready to join in a Burglary as any Thief in Christendom.” Equally ineffective as a deterrent were the public floggings and other forms of corporal punishment ordered by the courts. Mary Anderson, “a loose and profligate Wretch,” was given thirty-nine lashes for theft in 1754, and “she afforded some Diversion while at the Post to the Mob, as she was very obstinate and resisting.”
In 1759 the Common Council responded to the rising clamor for action by erecting a new city jail in the Common (at the northeast corner of today’s City Hall Park). The New Gaol was quickly filled with French and Indian prisoners of war, however, and the council had to begin making plans for a second structure. Three years later the council took the further step of creating a paid watch to patrol the streets at night. It decided, too, to begin installing whale-oil lamps around town and hired municipal lamplighters to keep them lit.
Besides crime, the council had to contend with the ever-present danger of fire, magnified now by the great stockpiles of