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By Root 7328 0

into taking up arms once again against the immemorial foe. Overcoming sometimes violent resistance by impoverished owners, the police flushed five to six thousand pigs out of cellars and garrets and drove an estimated twenty thousand swine north to the upper wards that summer. (At the same time, in an exterminating frenzy spurred on by municipal bounties, 3,520 stray dogs were killed in the streets, mostly by small boys with clubs.) The authorities, moreover, kept up their campaign year after year, banishing from lower Manhattan (in 1851—2) all bone-boiling works (along with the putrefying carcasses piled high in their yards). In the late 1850s Hog Town was invaded and the westside piggery complex between 50th and 59th streets dismantled. By 1860 New York’s porkers had been definitively exiled north of 86th Street and transformed into a distinctively “uptown” menace.

Cows were another story. Absent refrigeration, the city’s on-the-hoof meat supply had to be kept close at hand. Besides, the Common Council was reluctant to limit the entrepreneurship of powerful butchers. An 1853 ordinance did ban cattle drives south of 42nd Street (at least in the daytime), but that still left 206 slaughterhouses open for business, which butchered over 375,000 animals annually (usually draining excess blood to the gutters). Then there were the eleven public markets, the 531 private markets or butcher shops, the tanneries with their piles of putrid hides, and the beasts—usually five thousand a year—who simply dropped dead in the streets from natural causes. In August 1853 alone, the city’s contract scavenger reported clearing away 690 cows, 577 horses, 883 dogs, 111 cats, fourteen hogs, and six sheep—plus 1,303 tons of “butchers offal” and sixty-two tons of refuse bones from the slaughterhouses.

Then there was shit. The mercantile boom had vastly expanded the horse-based transport system—in 1854, there were 22,500 horses pulling public vehicles alone and countless others hauling private ones—collectively plopping tons of manure in the streets each day. Humans contributed their share via thousands of overflowing privies and cesspools, especially in the densely overpopulated tenement districts, where absentee landlords were disinclined to waste profits on tenant amenities, and tenants lacked money to pay privy cleaners. Where night scavengers did make pickups, they often spilled much of their cargo along the lanes as they jounced their way to the waterfront. There they dumped their loads onto (or off of) the wharves, where poorly designed slips held the effluent fast to the shore and were themselves rendered almost impassable to vessels, to say nothing of the stench.

That New York was drowning in garbage was in large measure a by-product of the explosive and unregulated growth that few were willing to impede. But the problem was compounded by the city’s having turned street cleaning over to private contractors in 1842, convinced this would bring improved service and lower costs. In the real world, collection contracts were often handed out as political plums to recipients who felt little compunction to make more than token swabs on the main streets; or they were awarded to the lowest bidders, often unprincipled sorts who hadn’t the slightest intention of doing any work whatever.

Ironically, Croton water, so recently hailed as savior, only made matters worse. The rich built water closets in profusion, which when flushed with Croton water overflowed their cesspools even more rapidly. They consequently clamored for the right to plug directly into the sewers, which had been built for draining storm water from the streets. In 1845 the Common Council permitted such hookups. However, the pipes had been laid at right angles or awkward grades that could handle swift-moving rain runoff but couldn’t cope with thick and sluggish wastewater. The result: impenetrable blockages, clogged pipes, and rampant flooding.

This problem was in turn resolved—in part—by building new sewers. The drawback here was that sewers, financed by assessments on adjacent property