Feb

4

Thursday, February 4, 2021 – THE REALITY OF LIFE WITH HORSES WAS RATHER UNPLEASANT IN THE URBAN CENTERS

By admin

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2021

The

278th Edition
 

From Our Archives

A CLEANER WORLD

WITH AUTOMOBILES

STEPHEN BLANK

A Cleaner World with Automobiles

One of the promises of our early Roosevelt Island was that it would be auto-free. That would never be the case, but this suggests that many of us were charmed by the notion of living in a heaven with no auto noises, fumes or congestion. Well, return with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear when the automobile was viewed as the solution to transportation noise, fumes and congestion. 

The problem: Horses.

A lot of horses.

In late nineteenth century, New York contained somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 horses. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses, from fancy carriages pulled by the finest breeds to cabs and horse trollies as well as countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the City’s rapidly growing population.

Judy Berdy in an earlier number of the Almanac, pointed out some of the City’s lovely nineteenth century stables. That’s true, but we have to look at the other end of the animal, too. Each horse produced up to 30 pounds of manure per day and a quart of urine. All of this ended up in their stables or along the street. For those of you slow on your math, that adds up to millions of pounds each day and over 100,000 tons per year (not to mention around 10 million gallons of urine).

A lot, indeed. By the end of the 19th century, vacant lots around New York City housed manure piles that reached 40 or 60 feet high. It was estimated that in a few decades, every street would have manure piled up to third story levels.

Streets covered by horse manure attracted huge numbers of flies. One estimate claimed that horse manure was the hatching ground for three billion flies daily throughout the United States, flies that spread disease rapidly through dense human populations. In the winter, manure mixed with the dirt of unpaved streets to form a detestable, smelly, gooey muck and in the summer, the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. Come summer, the smell was overbearing and when it rained, poop-rivers flooded the streets and sidewalks often seeping into people’s basements.

Horses also died. Often in the middle of the street. When they died, their carcasses were abandoned on the streets, creating an additional health issue. In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets. But sometimes a big carcass would simply be left to rot until it had disintegrated enough for someone to pick up the pieces.

Moreover, 19th-century New York was already unsettlingly unsanitary, with whole swathes of the city dominated by “a loathsome train of dependent nuisances” like slaughterhouses, facilities for fat melting and gut-cleaning, and “manure heaps in summer” that stretched across entire blocks.

Bear in mind that an increasing number of our New York predecessors shared smaller and smaller spaces with all of this. The human density of New York City rose over the 19th century from just below 40,000 people per square mile to above 90,000, and we had our own waste to deal with.

But as we have seen earlier with clean water and waste, New Yorkers were not keen to spend to improve their situation. Some cities tried to cover the cost of street cleaning by selling the manure for fertilizer. In 1803 the New York superintendent of scavengers spent about $26,000 for street cleaning and realized over $29,000 from selling the manure collected. Nevertheless, it was soon impossible to absorb the huge production distributed around the city. There was so much that farmers began to charge for taking it away.

The structural problem was that the larger and richer cities became, the more horses they needed to function, to move and haul ever growing numbers of people and amounts of goods. Technological innovation didn’t help – indeed made things worse. The horse remained essential in urban civilization, even after the development of the steam engine. As the Nation noted in 1872, though great improvements had been made in the development of such “agents of progress” as the railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph, modern society’s continued to depend the horse. For it was the horse who fed the railroads and steamboats with passengers and freight, and who provided transportation within the cities.

The more horses, the more manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.

In the late 1800s, the city hired drainage engineer George E. Waring Jr., who had worked on Central Park, to start cleaning things up. He pushed for new laws forcing owners to stable horses overnight (instead of leaving them in the streets) and mobilized crews to gather manure and horse corpses to be sold for fertilizer and glue. What they couldn’t sell was dumped. And the City tried harder – sewage infrastructure was improved, and the first streetcar lines appeared (horse-drawn, but able to carry more passengers than a carriage); in addition, public transport was encouraged and street cleaning crews (known as White Wings because of their white uniforms) were established.

Still, the situation remained so grim that in 1898, then New York Mayor George E. Waring Jr. organized the first international congress on urban planning. Manure was the main topic. This event, the first environmental summit in history, was attended by representatives from other cities to develop ideas on how to resolve the manure issue. But despite their collective efforts, participants were unable to solve the problem and the conference planned for 10 days concluded on the third.

By then, things were changing. Electric streetcars were gaining traction. Rising land pricing (for stables and farmland) coupled with higher food costs increasingly made these new options more economical, too. But the rise of private cars was the final nail in the horse-drawn coffin.

Automobiles were cleaner, quieter and healthier than horses! “The horse in the city is bound to be a menace to a condition of perfect health,” warned one leading urban health authority in 1901. Public health officials charged that windblown dust from ground-up manure damaged eyes and irritated respiratory organs, while the “noise and clatter” of city traffic aggravated nervous diseases. Since, noted Scientific American, the motor vehicle left no litter and was “always noiseless or nearly so”, the exit of the horse would “benefit the public health to an almost incalculable degree.” By 1912, cars outnumbered horses on the streets of NYC and by 1917 the last horsecar was put out of commission and the issue of horse droppings slowly disappeared into history.

But progress has a price: Many businesses collapsed and many jobs lost. Not counting those who directly drove or cared for horses, in New York and Brooklyn in 1880, there were 427 blacksmith shops, 249 carriage and wagon enterprises, 262 wheelwright shops, and 290 establishments dealing in saddles and harnesses. Add to this vets and the makers and suppliers of all the goods dealt with by these enterprises.

So our lovely island was never car-free. But it could be worse. We could have had horses.

Stephen Blank
RIHS
February 2, 2021

THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

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WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

St. Paul’s Chapel

When it first opened in 1766 as an outreach chapel of Trinity Church to better serve its expanding congregation, St. Paul’s was a “chapel-of-ease” for those who did not want to walk a few blocks south along unpaved streets to Trinity. A decade later, the Great Fire of 1776 destroyed the first Trinity Church, but St. Paul’s survived, thanks to a bucket brigade dousing the building with water.

Until the second Trinity Church was rebuilt in 1790, many, including George Washington, made St. Paul’s their church home. On April 30, 1789, after Washington took the oath of office to become the first President of the United States, he made his way from Federal Hall on Wall Street to St. Paul’s Chapel, where he attended services.

Over the next two centuries, the ministries of St. Paul’s expanded along with the city. Community outreach was a primary focus, with services to accommodate the needs of immigrants, working women, and the homeless.

After September 11, 2001, St. Paul’s became the site of an extraordinary, round-the-clock relief ministry to rescue and recovery workers for nine months. Though the World Trade Center buildings collapsed just across the street, there was no damage to St. Paul’s, earning it the nickname “the little chapel that stood.”

Today, St. Paul’s Chapel and Trinity Church (on Broadway at Wall Street) are the cornerstones of Trinity Church Wall Street, a vibrant Episcopal parish that serves the community with worship, arts, education, and social justice outreach. St. Paul’s Chapel is committed to leadership, social justice, and reconciliation as it carries its legacy into the future.

HARA REISER, ANDY SPARBERG, ARLENE BESSENOFF GOT IT RIGHT

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD

Copyright © 2021 Roosevelt Island Historical Society, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:
rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com

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