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By Root 8107 0

in the south-eastern part of the City.” In mid-July, the health officer was summoned to attend three sick seamen aboard a vessel in the East River. He caught the disease and died eight days later. More cases surfaced on the waterfront. The Health Committee denied any occasion for alarm, but many wealthy men sent their families out of town in August. Then the number of cases shot upward, touching off a mass September exodus. Well-to-do residents shuttered their businesses and decamped for Greenwich, Harlem, and other nearby country villages, leaving thousands of unemployed mechanics and laborers to fend for themselves. Health Committee members made daily rounds, giving medical treatment, distributing relief, and sending victims up to Bellevue. The fever burned on through October until cool weather brought a sharp reduction in mortality, but by then the epidemic had claimed a record 732 victims—and had proved, according to Mayor Richard Varick, “most fatal among the poor emigrants, who lived and died in filth and dirt.”

Milder outbreaks followed in the summers of 1796 and 1797, during which the Health Committee removed the sick to a new “pesthouse” on Bedloe’s Island, while at the same time moving to purchase Bellevue outright, as well as the adjoining property of merchant Samuel Kipp, for an isolation hospital. The legislature, meanwhile, created a permanent Health Office, staffed by commissioners selected by the Council of Appointment, and gave it the right to make and enforce ordinances for cleaning the city.

In 1798, amid frantic preparations for war with France, the fever slammed into New York with greater fury than ever. The first cases came to light at the end of July, again in the dock areas by the East River. Within weeks every resident able to do so had fled, crowding into “every vehicle, from the humble dungcart to the gilded carriage” to escape, as Grant Thorburn described the scene, “fear quickening their pace, and the destroying angel at their heels.” Left behind were the poor and dependent, many made destitute by the death or incapacity of the household wage-earner. The doctors of New York remained on the job—twenty of them falling victim to the fever—while the new state health commissioners, aided by zealous watchmen, carted the sick up to Bellevue and established three “cook houses” where the poor were given soup, boiled meat, and bread. At the peak of the epidemic in September and October, sixteen hundred to two thousand were fed each day, and another eight hundred at the almshouse, the cost covered by Common Council appropriations and donations from wealthy merchants and other towns. Thorburn too stayed on, making nails for a Warren Street carpenter who was trying to keep up with the demand for coffins; two little boys hawked the pine boxes around town on a bandwagon, stopping at intersections to sing out, “Coffins! Coffins of all sizes!” “Death and we shook hands so often in those times,” Thorburn recalled, “that his bony fingers appeared as soft as a lady’s glove.”

When the crisis finally passed, the disease had claimed 2,086 lives—close to 5 percent of the population. While a number of prominent citizens lay dead, Melancton Smith and printer Thomas Greenleaf among them, the great majority of victims, as in previous epidemics, were poor. Many were buried in the new potter’s field, just opened in 1797, to the north of town on the site of today’s Washington Square.

Shaken by this catastrophe, the Common Council established a committee to investigate its causes. Their report, made public in 1799, came down hard on unsanitary conditions, attributing the disease to “filthy sunken yards” filled with offal, putrefying matter in pools of stagnant water, damp cellars, foul slips, decayed docks, open sewers, and overflowing privies. The report called for sweeping reforms, which it admitted would inconvenience and abridge the property rights of citizens. But the public welfare came before individual rights, the committee concluded, and the Common Council should have “great and strong power, to clean up the city.