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By Root 8174 0

were valued at over two million dollars, and soon there were nearly fifteen thousand attending twelve select schools and thirty-one free schools. Some of these were artfully counterplaced: when crowds of Catholic parents prevented children from entering Pease’s House of Industry in the fall of 1853, they redirected their youngsters to a parochial school that had been deliberately set up nearby. New orphanages rose, to prevent Catholic children being consigned to Protestant asylums and “brought up in hatred of that religion which was the only and last consolation of their dying parents!” The most spectacular countermeasure was launched in 1863 when the enormous Catholic Protectory was inaugurated on 114 acres of farmland in the Bronx—a rural training center where city boys could be rescued from the wicked city and the Children’s Aid Society alike.

ENTER THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS

In 1842 John H. Griscom, a learned and pious Quaker physician who served on the AICP’s first executive committee, issued a scorching report on sanitary conditions in the city. Griscom had seen the effects of living in cellars and tenements close up during his years of service at the New York Dispensary and New York Hospital, and after he was appointed to John Pintard’s old post of city inspector in 1842, he embarked on a comprehensive survey of city health.

Griscom concluded that a good deal of metropolitan mortality was avoidable. To his mind, “first among the most serious causes of disordered general health” was the city’s crowded and poorly ventilated housing, especially its rear courts and cellars (he found some that housed as many as forty-eight persons), and he bitterly condemned the cupidity of those who had taken advantage of abject destitution to convert their basements “into living graves for human beings.” Griscom’s second-ranked killer was the omnipresent filth, which resulted from obscenely overused facilities (often fifty people shared a single privy) and from abysmal drainage and sewerage.

After carefully demonstrating the connection between unsanitary living conditions and poor health, Griscom argued for preventive action. Like his predecessors, he wanted common nuisances eliminated. But he went farther, citing studies of Edwin Chadwick and other English health reformers, and urged construction of a comprehensive sewage and drainage system and free provision of Croton water to the entire population. Griscom also sought public regulation of housing. Going far beyond the existing fire-related statutes, he asked for legislation to protect residents “from the pernicious influence of badly arranged houses and apartments.” Griscom wanted to require landlords to provide tenants with adequate space and fresh air (at least ten cubic feet per minute per adult). He urged banning the use of cellars, limiting the number of residents per building, and holding landlords accountable for keeping buildings clean. To ensure compliance, he proposed replacing politically appointed health wardens with nonpolitical medical experts—a Health Police, authorized to make routine inspections and, if necessary, close down places found unfit for human habitation.

The aldermen did not take kindly to Griscom’s proposals, which among other things would lop off lots of patronage positions, and the doctor was not reappointed as city inspector. But a group of reformers including Peter Cooper put together a fund to publish an expanded version of his 1842 study, and The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York—a landmark in the history of public health—came out in 1845.

Among Griscom’s many striking departures from conventional bourgeois wisdom was his refusal to blame the poor for their wretched housing. He knew that lack of fresh water and adequate sanitation made it impossible for residents to keep clean and pious homes, even if they wanted to, and he even declined to blame laboring men for escaping from such hovels to the grogshops. For Griscom, dirt was a symptom of poverty, not its cause.

On the other hand, he didn’t blame the rich, as the land