• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7778 0

something hitherto sabotaged by municipal lethargy and political corruption. Since 1882 the garbage collected by cartmen had been taken to riverside dumps, where it was loaded or “trimmed” on scows by private operators who paid for the privilege of picking out old shoes, carpets, paper, rugs, rags, and bones, which they sorted, baled, and sold—rags and paper to paper mills, bones to soda makers, iron to junk dealers and on to foundries. The remainder was hauled out into the harbor and dumped. Since 1871, it had been against state law to offload into the Harlem or East rivers or the Upper Bay, but south of the Narrows was still acceptable. By the late 1880s, however, ocean-dumped garbage was killing oyster and clam beds and drifting back to beaches. Redirecting the refuse to Hiker’s Island’s landfills brought furious complaints from Queens, Manhattan, and Bronx residents sickened by the terrible odors.

“Specimens of Colonel Waring’s splendid work in street cleaning, before and after he began, 1898-95,” Harper’s Weekly, June 22, 1896. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

To solve all these problems at once, Waring in 1896 required that householders put out their ashes, their garbage (organic animal and vegetable wastes), and their rubbish (drystuffs such as paper, cardboard, tin cans, bottles, shoes, carpets) in separate containers. Mayor Strong assigned him forty policemen to ensure compliance. Department employees then sent ashes—along with street sweepings (mainly dirt)—to be dumped at Riker’s Island rather than at sea, along with rubbish, once it had been scavenged by scow trimmers for salable items. Finally, Waring contracted with the New York Sanitary Utilization Company to pick up garbage and take it to a plant on Barren Island in Jamaica Bay. There “digestors” cooked and stewed it until oil and grease were separated out for sale to manufacturers, and the residue was dried and ground into fertilizer.

Though ocean dumping was thus cut to a minimum, Waring did nothing to tackle the growing problem of industrial pollution. Hunter’s Point chemical plants continued to pour toxic by-products into Dutch Kills and Newtown Creek. Oil leaks and spills created a constant danger of petroleum vapor conflagration there, and in Newark Bay as well, but as one Queens newspaper noted, “the petroleum industry is of such overwhelming magnitude and importance and is operated by such heavy combinations of capital that it is doubtful whether even by an appeal to the State Legislature” the practice could be halted.

Nevertheless, reformers adored Waring: he was their first star. He demonstrated that despite Tammany taunts about goo-goo ineffectiveness, reformers could deliver. The man provided businesslike nonpolitical efficiency, fostered civic pride, advanced a godly cleanliness, and, via a ruthless paternalism, kept labor in line and productive. For having so thoroughly proved there were viable alternatives to machine rule, they would in 1898 elect him president of the City Club.

GERM WARFARE

A less dazzling star in the reform firmament, but one of arguably even greater importance, was Dr. Hermann Biggs, a holdover from the Tammany regime whom Strong and company had the good sense to retain and encourage. Biggs, who had studied at Bellevue Hospital Medical College and in German laboratories, was by 1885 running Bellevue’s new Carnegie Lab, working as the hospital’s (and city’s) pathologist, and serving as visiting physician at the workhouse and almshouse while maintaining a sizable private practice.

In 1889, after reviewing the work of German bacteriologist Robert Koch, Biggs wrote a landmark report for the Health Department concluding that tuberculosis was communicable and thus preventable. As the disease was acquired by direct transmission of bacilli, usually by dried and pulverized sputum floating dustlike in air, regular disinfection of wards and houses with tubercular patients, as well as rigorous inspections of the city’s meat and milk supply, might make serious inroads against a disease that killed more than