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By Root 7587 0

holding bins placed beneath backyard outhouses. An 1823 city ordinance had required they be made of stone, be sunk at least five feet deep, and pass city inspection. In practice, brick or wood remained common, many were shallowly positioned, and exemptions were liberally granted. But no matter how well or ill they were made, the city’s privies were not prepared for the torrent of shit that now descended on them, courtesy of a proliferating population. One (admittedly notorious) building between Christopher and Grove housed forty-one families, all of whom shared one indescribably disgusting privy, but the routine state of affairs was bad enough. When porous vaults were situated higher than adjoining basements, their contents oozed downward into the living quarters of invariably poorer neighbors. And when backed-up privies overflowed, which was often, or when storms produced local flooding, human effluvia was swept into the streets, where it mingled with the rest of the awful offal.

Privies were emptied periodically by “necessary tubmen”—one of the few jobs reserved exclusively for blacks. Hired by the city, they were mandated to carry their loads in closed carts, in dead of night or early morn, though this hardly mitigated their impact. In stifling summer months New Yorkers slept with their windows open, and the stench from passing “night carts” was powerful enough to wake the most somnolent. Also, to brace themselves for their revolting labors, some tubmen fortified themselves with strong liquor, and their consequently raucous behavior generated additional complaints, particularly in working-class neighborhoods.

Their routes run, the tubmen either laid their burdens down in landfill areas, dumped them directly into the rivers (where they quickly coated the docks with slime), or delivered them to fertilizer dealers who mixed them with sawdust and spent charcoal, producing a light manure they sold to farmers. The one thing tubmen were not allowed to do with human waste was put it in the sewers.

Sewers were for water, not garbage of any description, and had been since drains were first built in Manhattan in 1676. The first sewers had been open trenches for carrying off storm water from low-lying areas and preventing hazardous accumulations. By 1800 such trenches were common; made of stone, brick, cement, or planks, they ran down the center or along the sides of streets. They were built wide enough to permit access for cleaning, but the breadth made them slow running, stagnant, and foul; to avoid decomposition by the sun, some were dug six feet deep, or below low-water mark. The covered-over sewer under Canal Street, in the absence of air traps, continued to reek on warm days, and the resulting decline in property values was long remembered.

In 1819 the Common Council had explicitly prohibited the use of sewers to carry off fecal matter. It further required installation of grates at the junction of common sewers with household drains, which allowed flood water in and kept solid wastes out. Dr. Hosack argued against this, proposing instead adoption of water closets connected to sewers that would then convey “every species of filth” to the rivers. He admitted, however, that the requisite flushing process would depend on New York’s obtaining a far more abundant source of water than currently available.

The city’s water was not only scarce, but brackish, and it was fast becoming deadly. In 1829 researchers from the Lyceum of Natural History estimated that in every twenty-four hours New Yorkers deposited over one hundred tons of excrement into the alluvium, from whence, accompanied by other soluble waste, it percolated down to the water table. In the 1830s, due to the increase in privies and to seepage from old graveyards, downtown wells were bringing up a tainted brew.

With pure water now a scarce commodity, it became allocated according to marketplace rules, by ability to pay. The poor continued to use city wells, including the ancient “tea water pump.” Artisans bought water, at a penny a gallon, from enterprising carters