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who carried hogsheads of “pure” country springwater around the city; it too was often polluted. Even the well-to-do had problems, if they relied on Aaron Burr’s old gambit, the Manhattan Company. The firm expanded its skimpy service at a sludge-like pace, just enough to keep its banking privileges from being revoked. As the city moved north, the Manhattan’s waterworks grew more remote from more people (the company didn’t operate above Grand Street). By the end of the War of 1812, its scant twenty-three miles of wooden pipes delivered perfunctory service to its select (and increasingly furious) clientele. Municipal authorities, albeit reluctant to take on one of the city’s leading bondholders, came around slowly to the notion that water was a public good, which should be publicly produced.

In 1821 Mayor Allen again proposed diverting the Bronx River into a municipal reservoir. In 1825 the state chartered a private company to bring water down from Westchester, but nothing much was done until 1829, when the city built its own reservoir. A huge cast-iron tank—forty-three feet in diameter, twenty feet high, with a capacity of 305,422 gallons—was set atop an octagonal stone tower twenty-seven feet high, at the corner of the Bowery and 13th Street. Water was carried from here south to the city by iron pipes, one running down Broadway to Canal, the other down the Bowery to Catherine.

Farther than this the city would not go. For the affluent and powerful, the absence of abundant fresh water remained an annoyance, not a crisis. But in the slums, the consequences of pollution, squalor, and crowding were about to become lethal.

CHOLERA

In 1832 the cholera roared into town. New Yorkers had seen it coming. They had read in their papers of its devastating march across Asia and the trade routes to Europe, reaching Poland, then France, then England. City authorities knew the plague might well ride the sea lanes to the Hudson, but did next to nothing with this foreknowledge.

New York’s old Board of Health certainly had authority to act. Yet it had been lulled into quiescence in the ten years since the yellow fever epidemic of 1822. Its approach to disease prevention, moreover, now concentrated almost exclusively on quarantining ships from dangerous southern waters. Even there, it was under constant pressure not to render too hasty a diagnosis that would cut off the flow of trade and profit. The board, one critic noted caustically, was “more afraid of the merchants than of lying.”

As spring turned to summer, the corporation’s inactivity spurred men of medicine to demand action. The Medical Society, which represented two-thirds of the city’s licensed physicians, urged immediate cleaning of streets, yards, and vacant lots, disinfection of privies and cesspools with quicklime, and establishment of a network of emergency hospitals. The city administration responded with an apathy partly rooted in the conviction—widely shared, but advanced most ardently by evangelical clergymen—that the plague, should it come, would pass over the virtuous parts of town and descend, like God’s wrath, on its sin-infested quarters. Ministers told the pious that the path of righteousness was the road to health. Temperance activists plastered Manhattan’s walls with notices like QUIT DRAM DRINKING IF YOU WOULD NOT HAVE THE CHOLERA.(There was nothing like the possibility of suffering and death for bringing sinners to their knees, wrote Lewis Tappan, with something approaching glee.)

Physicians’ belief in “predisposing causes” also suggested the likeliest victims would be those who, through indulgence in vice, intemperance, and filthy living habits, had weakened and predisposed themselves to the disease. Science and religion thus sailed on parallel courses, with their essential interconnections drawn out most clearly by Sylvester Graham, who lectured that liquor, impure foods, and sexual dissipation undermined the body’s ability to resist the cholera. Bon vivants ridiculed the Grahamites and advised citizens to fortify themselves with a hearty diet of meat, spices,