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By Root 8313 0

owners, were built only when resident proprietors or speculative realtors petitioned for them. Unlike the water supply, which had been designed as a system and paid for out of the common treasury, sanitation was reserved to those who could afford it. Sewer pipes slithered up Lexington, Second, and Third, where horsecar lines had facilitated better home construction, but most Irish and German areas remained bereft. Even where trunk lines did penetrate working-class quarters—along Stanton, Rivington, Delancey, Broome, and Grand—landlords refused to connect up with them, just as they resisted paying the Croton Aqueduct Department’s installation fee and its annual water rent of ten dollars. In 1854, however, in yet another concession to environmentalists, the Common Council ruled that residences had to be connected to sewer lines. And in 1856 it passed an ordinance limiting construction of new buildings to lots serviced by drains.

Nevertheless, in 1857 (the AICP noted), only 138 miles of the city’s five hundred miles of paved streets had been sewered. This left two-thirds of all New Yorkers still reliant on backyard and basement privies, whose overflow continued to seep to the water table, infect public wells used by the poor, flood cellars, and leave missionaries and physicians routinely horrified to find children playing and mothers hanging the wash in yards coated with human excrement and swarming with flies. Against all this, the pioneering Bath and Wash House opened by the AICP in 1852 was a worthy but woefully insufficient response.

Foul milk, like foul water, proved durable and deadly. Dairy herds, like beef cattle, had to be kept near consumers and were most densely concentrated on the west side near 16th Street. Often, to keep costs low, they were placed next to distilleries, allowing “swill,” the boiling-hot waste product of fermentation, to be fed directly into stable troughs in the cramped quarters. Swill had nutritive value but required supplementation with hay and grain. Few profit-conscious owners bothered to provide it. Nor were they overly concerned that disease ran rampant among their confined herds. They continued extracting thin blue milk from rotting and ulcerous cows until the animals died (at which point they were sold for meat). Then they doctored the product with magnesia, chalk, and stale eggs and passed it on to consumers, felling infants by the thousands.

Griscom and Hartley campaigned vigorously against swill milk, proposing city inspection, but neither city nor state was inclined to interfere with the workings of the free market, especially when the wealthy could afford good milk from farms in Westchester and Queens. By 1856 an estimated two-thirds of all milk sold in New York City was coming from distillery dairies. In 1858 Frank Leslie began a visual expose in his Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, depicting the milking of sick cows, detailing dairymen’s profits, and decrying lobbyist payoifs to aldermen. The Common Council reluctantly authorized an investigation, then dropped the matter. Not until 1862 would environmentalists win a swill-milk law from the state legislature, and it proved to be full of loopholes.

TENEMENT TROUBLES

Housing reformers too ran into brick walls, though some of their difficulty in finding a solution stemmed from their own misdiagnosis of the problem. John Griscom had focused his ire on the “merciless inflation and extortion of the sublandlord.” The AICP agreed that slumlords tended to be unscrupulous immigrants or, at best, firstgeneration Americans—petty exploiters, often operators of saloons, brothels, and gambling dens—difficult to distinguish, in other words, from their wretched tenants.

It was true that large landlords commonly sublet their buildings to middlemen, leaving to them the chore of extracting high rents, rather as big garment shops left small contractors to do the direct sweating of labor. It was also true that many of these intermediaries were lower-middle-class proprietors (grocers, tavern keepers, building tradesmen) who had jumped into the real