Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [474]
By the third week in July, with the epidemic at its height, great swathes of the city were deathly silent, their streets deserted. Then it ended. Moving on almost as rapidly as it had blown in, the cholera continued its journey along the trade routes, through the Erie Canal towns of western New York, down the Ohio Canal to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, tracing the pathways of the market economy with a finger of death.
In August the number of new cases began a steady decline. By the second half of the month, refugees began to trickle back. On August 29 medical authorities pronounced the city safe. Pintard was thrilled at the commercial resurrection. All was “life & bustle,” he rejoiced, with stores all open, sidewalks lined with bales and boxes, streets crowded with carts, and “clerks busy in making out Bills.” Beneath his notice, hundreds of beggars, vast numbers of them newly orphaned children, plied the streets. Benevolent ladies started up a Brooklyn Orphan Asylum to deal with the youthful survivors.
Stocktaking in the aftermath generally followed the lines of prior opinion. The Rev. Gardiner Spring saw in the pestilence “the hand of God,” with His sanitary and salutary purpose apparently having been “to drain off the filth and scum which contaminate and defile human society.” Sabbatarians declared the disease “owing to vices which a proper regard to the Sabbath would check more effectually than anything else.” Others blamed drink and slovenliness, including the governor of New York, who opined that “an infinitely wise and just God has seen fit to employ pestilence as one means of scourging the human race for their sins, and it seems to be an appropriate one for the sins of uncleanliness and intemperance.”
The immigrant poor, who had fared worst, came in for the greatest opprobrium. The Board of Health reported that “the low Irish suffered the most, being exceedingly dirty in their habits, much addicted to intemperance and crowded together into the worst portions of the city.” They were poor—due, of course, to their own idleness and fondness for drink—and poverty was the “natural parent of disease.” Philip Hone brought a more succinctly brutal indictment: “They have brought the cholera this year, and they will always bring wretchedness and want.”
Radicals insisted cholera was the result not of divine intervention but of human injustice. “It may be heretical,” said George Henry Evans, “but we firmly believe that the cholera so far from being a scourge of the Almighty is a scourge which mankind have brought upon themselves by their own bad arrangements which produce poverty among many, while abundance is in existence for all.” Certainly there was a correlation between poverty and mortality. But poverty was not a moral failing, Evans wrote that August in the Workingman’s Advocate, it was “occasioned by unjust remuneration of labor.” He urged New Yorkers to impose a graduated income tax that would secure funds from the wealthy to make recurrence of the disease impossible. Other radicals called on the city to create a park at Corlear’s Hook for working people, akin to facilities it was helping develop at Washington, Gramercy, and Union Squares; this was vetoed as too costly and unlikely to generate significant new tax revenues.
WATER
On one thing, there was general agreement: New York City needed fresh, clean water. Even those who saw divine intervention at work didn’t contest physicians and sanitarians like William MacNeven and John Griscom who pointed to the polluted drinking supply and the poisonous vapors rising from the streets as major contributors to the plague.
In October 1832 the Common Council appropriated a thousand dollars for an inquiry into how to fetch water to New York. A December report concluded that the Croton River in upper Westchester County was the best source for an “inexhaustible” supply. In 1833, at the Common Council’s behest, the legislature authorized creation of the New York State Water Commission,