Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [948]
Announcing he would run the city on purely “business principles,” Strong embarked on a three-year term that would span the remainder of the depression. The twin goals of the new mayor’s reform administration—efficiency and moral order—were soon apparent in the work of his appointees.
COLONEL WARING CLEANS THE STREETS
Strong handed command of the Department of Street Cleaning to Colonel George Edwin Waring Jr., a Civil War veteran. It was a brilliant choice. Waring was a sanitation engineer of high repute; he had directed the drainage of Central Park and had helped design and construct sewer systems in cities all over the United States. Waring was also of impeccable social standing, well known in the clubs and social circles of New York and Newport. Finally, he had long evidenced a steely determination that appealed to the new administration.
Waring inherited a department notorious for its inefficiency. Created in 1881, it had coped poorly with dirt, ashes, garbage, snow, and the 2.5 million pounds of manure and sixty thousand gallons of urine the city’s horses deposited each and every day along New York’s 250-plus miles of paved streets. Its problems stemmed from insufficient funding, inadequate authority, and intermittent public cooperation. It didn’t help that sweepers were primarily Tammany patronage appointees—hired and fired on the whims of politicians—and reportedly spent much of their workday in saloons.
Waring decided that before cleaning the streets he would clean up his men. A longtime devotee of martial virtues, Waring insisted employees purchase and don white duck uniforms and caps. He then paraded them down Fifth Avenue, twenty-seven hundred strong, in strict military order, their new commissioner prancing ahead on horseback. Waring posted rigorous new regulations—no entering saloons, no foul language, no neglecting of horses—and carried out personal inspection tours to see they were obeyed. He rallied his troops, honoring them as “soldiers of the public” who were “defending the health of the whole people,” then led them into battle.
Not all troopers were thrilled. Some sanitation workers denounced their uniforms as badges of servitude; it was embarrassing to be caricatured as a “Waring White Angel.” More to the point, they resented Waring’s arbitrary and dictatorial ways, notably his wage cuts. One of his earliest acts was to chop sweepers’ annual salaries from $720 to $600 a year, feasible enough given that Italian laborers were readily available in the open market for $350 a year. (Waring marveled at how well suited Italians were for garbage work, calling them “a race with a genius for rag-and-bone-picking and for subsisting on rejected trifles of food.”) Nor were workers pleased by his ruthless suppression of Knights of Labor resistance to such cuts. (“Strikes will not be tolerated for one moment.”) But Waring’s war on Tammany also brought workers benefits: they no longer had to contribute time, labor, and money to the machine. And Waring established an arbitration scheme—a joint management-labor board—which, though clearly an antiunion device, worked to the reasonable satisfaction of most employees.
The results were spectacular. Obstructions, particularly unharnessed vehicles, were briskly removed. Waring forced city trucking firms to stop leaving wagons on the streets for days or weeks; he objected to them because “thieves and highwaymen made them their dens, toughs caroused in them, both sexes resorted to them, and they were used for the vilest purposes.” Streets were scoured—those on the East Side as well as Fifth Avenue. Violators of the sanitary code were promptly arrested. Snow, once left to pile into mountains of grunge, was shoveled away. Harper’s proudly published beforeand-after photos.
Waring also imposed a recycling program,