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reformers did. Rather he appealed to them to provide decent housing, not just as “a measure of humanity, of justice to the poor,” but as a matter of self-interest. Bad housing meant sick workers, and sick workers meant lower profits, higher relief outlays, and higher taxes. Ultimately, too, slums fostered the growth of “a class in the community more difficult to govern, more disposed to robbery, mobs, and other lawless acts, and less accessible to the influence of religious and moral instruction.” Griscom was convinced that such rational appeals would have weight because the problem seemed to stem from lack of understanding: “One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.”

The comfortable half didn’t pay much attention to Griscom, however, until rudely reminded of the costs of inaction. In June 1849, scant weeks after the riot in Astor Place, James Gilligan, an Irish laborer, was found dead, sprawled on the dirt floor of a rear basement room he shared with four women on Orange Street; by next day three of his fellow tenants were dead too.

The previous December the packet ship New York had arrived in quarantine from Le Havre with cholera as a passenger. Three hundred steerage customers had been hastily sequestered in commandeered customs warehouses, but many escaped to the city in small boats. Within a week cases had begun appearing in crowded immigrant boardinghouses. The cold winter had slowed its spread; now the disease roused itself and leapt out of the Points, sending the city into plague mode. The Board of Health struggled to find space for a makeshift hospital; turned down everywhere, they seized a colored public school. Railroads and steamships pulled in with no passengers aboard. Hotels emptied out. Business stopped.

The wealthy escaped to the country, leaving the disease to claim over five thousand of their poorer compatriots (another 642 died in Brooklyn). Bodies lay in the streets for days. Eventually they were rowed over to Randall’s Island and dumped in an open trench, at which point a gruesome public health device came into play as thousands of rats swam over and gnawed the flesh from the carcasses before they rotted.

As in 1832, many declared the cholera God’s retribution for sin—notably that of being Catholic. (Had not over 40 percent of the casualties been born in Ireland?) Indeed the Herald was amazed to find victims “among the respectable, including even ladies.” Overall, however, the cholera—together with the Astor riot and rising radicalism—strengthened the hand of those who argued that moralizing was no longer a sufficient response to social crisis. The relationship between ethics and environment had to be reconceptualized as an interactive rather than a one-way affair. “The physical and moral are closely allied,” announced the liberal Protestant New York Independent in 1850, trying out the new thinking: “The habit of living in squalor and filth engenders vice, and vice, on the other hand, finds a congenial home in the midst of physical impurities.” Poor people tended to be sick people, a group of state officials noted, and vice versa. Even Hartley began to temper his moralizing and to admit that substandard housing, inadequate sanitation, and other environmental or circumstantial factors might be causes as well as consequences of poverty.

The implication for action, Charles Loring Brace concluded robustly, was that “Material Reform and Spiritual Reform must mutually help one another.” But the former would prove as difficult to obtain as the latter, especially as the municipality and state, smitten with laissez-faire, had dismantled much of their eighteenth-century regulatory apparatus. Still, the patent social breakdown registered by the crudest of social indicators—corpses stacked like cordwood—gave newly enthused reformers the chance to make a considerable impact on the urban landscape.

Another pig round-up, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 13, 1859. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

Starting with hogs. The 1849 catastrophe jolted the city