Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [732]
Griscom blasted his old department, noting that since he’d left twenty years earlier, its expenses had shot up, and so had the city’s mortality rate. In terms of public health, Griscom charged, New York had regressed to London’s position two centuries earlier. To counter opponents with solid statistics, militant physicians organized a Council of Hygiene and Public Health and initiated a block-by-block, tenement-to-tenement survey of Manhattan. Dividing the city into twenty-nine districts, the council assigned each a doctor, who visited every building and put to every family a written schedule of questions. Artists went along, sketched conditions, and prepared illustrations. The mammoth study (it ran to seventeen volumes) was then condensed to a five-hundred-page Sanitary Report, published in June 1865.
The report startled even those hardened by two decades of such surveys. The examiners had discovered that smallpox—a preventable disease—was rampant in the city; they turned up fifteen hundred cases in their first few days investigating. The Council of Hygiene called on the city to replace its voluntary (and disorganized) vaccination efforts with a compulsory program. But smallpox was only a small part of the story. Where Philadelphia’s death rate per thousand was twenty and London’s was twenty-two, New York City’s stood at thirty-three. This meant that thirteen thousand people were dying each year from diseases and conditions that were probably avoidable. And for each death there were twenty-eight cases of disease: in some tenements, 50 to 70 percent of the residents were sick at any given moment. This added up to a vast amount of preventable illness and—a fact the council underscored for the business community—a corresponding loss of work hours.
By 1865 the Citizens Association had distributed two million sanitarian tracts in every part of town, sponsored many public meetings, and once again introduced a health bill in the legislature. Incorporating provisions of England’s public health laws, it urged that a nonpolitical board of experts be given extraordinary powers to clean up unsanitary conditions. Union League Club members testified on the bill’s behalf. Once again it was blocked by municipal bureaucrats and politicians and by those who resisted giving government agencies substantial power over property rights. The legislature did, however, authorize New York City’s Croton Aqueduct Department to devise a plan for the systematic sewering of all Manhattan, free from interference by the Common Council.
Scavengers on the Beach Street dumping barge, Harper’s Weekly, September 29, 1866. Here, the paper said, men, women, and children dug through “the refuse of respectable folk” to find anything that could be used or sold to junk dealers. (Library of Congress)
At just this point, cholera tugged at the legislators’ sleeves. In August of 1865 newspapers announced that the disease had reached Europe and was heading west. In November a steamship arrived with sixty cases aboard. A cold winter retarded its movement, but alarmed state lawmakers realized that in spring the plague might well scythe through New York’s tenement population and then, as in the past, press on to devastate Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. In February 1866, therefore, Albany created a Metropolitan Board of Health and gave it extraordinary powers to fight the scourge. The new board could order any person deemed a health threat removed from home to hospital. It could order property owners to rectify unhealthy conditions. Such orders could be enforced by the police or the board’s own officers.
When spring came the board sent an army of agents marching through town, making house-to-house inspections and cleaning and disinfecting privies, cellars, and yards. It commissioned new street-cleaning