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The Common Council drafted a bill for the legislature embodying virtually all the recommendations. The legislature enacted it promptly, and in the next few years municipal authorities would embark on a series of unprecedented interventions in hitherto private affairs. (The state also passed a new quarantine act in 1799 and built a quarantine station on Staten Island, at Tompkinsville. By 1800 the first buildings of the new Marine Hospital were ready to receive fever victims and to accommodate sick passengers removed from incoming vessels.)

While these initiatives were underway, fever flare-ups remained mild until the summer of 1803, when again, one physician wrote, “the wealthy early abandoned the city, and the poor are daily falling victims to its ravages.” The state-appointed Health Commission did excellent work, but in the wake of this latest epidemic the Common Council decided to establish its own Board of Health, to be headed by Mayor De Witt Clinton. The legislature agreed and ceded all powers to the new body, including the authority to order any vessel into quarantine. The city supplemented the new Board of Health with an even more novel office, that of city inspector. Its mission would be to gather information about public nuisances and propose ordinances to “remove or correct” them, in order to ensure “the future health of the City.” The task was soon assigned to John Pintard, who had on his own been collecting mortality statistics for the city since 1802. At his urging, the Common Council soon expanded the city inspector’s tasks to include maintaining a Register of Births and Marriages and keeping a record of admissions and deaths at Bellevue.

The first Board of Health was constituted just as the epidemic of 1805 broke—during which time, Pintard reported, twenty-seven thousand of the city’s estimated seventy-five thousand residents fled town, most to Greenwich Village, taking along the Customs Office, the post office, and the offices of many newspapers and businesses. The Board of Health didn’t hesitate to use its powers, and the Common Council backed it up with a virtually unlimited expense account. The board evacuated all contaminated streets near the East River and set up tents and barracks at Greenwich and Bellevue for anyone who couldn’t afford to rent temporary quarters. This proved effective, though the Board didn’t know why (evacuation left no one for the infected mosquitoes to bite).

After 1805 yellow fever disappeared from New York for fourteen years. While this probably had more to do with a parallel decline of the disease in the West Indies, it was due in part to the burst of municipal action triggered by the disaster of 1798, above all a drainage campaign that might have reduced, albeit inadvertently, breeding places for mosquitoes.

EXCREMENT AND FROG-SPAWN

When city authorities cast about for possible sources of pollution, they didn’t have to look much farther than the no-longer Fresh Water Pond. The seventy-acre-wide, sixty-foot-deep spring-fed basin where the Lenapes had once caught fish and killed ducks was, by 1800, what one contributor to the Daily Advertiser termed “a shocking hole . . . foul with excrement, frog-spawn and reptiles.” Nearby residents had made the pond a “very sink and common sewer. It’s like a fair every day with whites, and blacks, washing their clothes, blankets, and things. . . sudds and filth are emptied into this pond, besides dead dogs, cats,” and the like. Worse yet were the potteries, breweries, tanneries, rope-walks, and furnaces that lined the pond’s southern and eastern banks. Landed and mercantile interests meanwhile complained that runoffs from the pond fed a stretch of marshes and swamps between modern Chambers and Canal that nearly cut the island in two, blocking the northward flow of population. One outlet, a sluggish stream, ran along modern Canal Street before losing itself in the swampy wooded salt marshes known as Lispenard’s Meadows, where for decades gentlemen had taken guns and dogs to shoot woodcock and snipe. To the southeast, a second outlet