by Sonia Shah
After that, New Yorkers had to make do with groundwater—the water that had seeped down below the surface—which they tapped at public wells on the street corners. These were dangerously shallow. Today’s standards would call for at least a fifty-foot casing and further drilling below that to reach uncontaminated groundwater, if there was any to be had. Manhattan’s nineteenth-century wells were only thirty feet deep. One such well, nestled amid the privies and cesspools of the city’s most notorious slum, Five Points, daily provided seven hundred thousand gallons of groundwater to one-third of the city’s residents, via a system of wooden pipes built by the Manhattan Company.24
New Yorkers knew that their drinking water was tainted. As a letter writer to a local paper noted in 1830,
I have no doubt that one cause of the numerous stomach affections so common in this city is the impure, I may say poisonous nature of the pernicious Manhattan water which thousands of us daily and constantly use. It is true that the unpalatableness of this abominable fluid prevents almost every person from using it as a beverage at the table, but you will know that all the cooking of a very large proportion of this community is done through the agency of this common nuisance. Our tea and coffee are made of it, our bread is mixed with it, and our meat and vegetables are boiled in it. Our linen happily escapes the contamination of its touch, “for no two things hold more antipathy” than soap and this vile water.25
“Can you bear to drink it on Sunday’s in the Summer-time?” a local paper complained in 1796. “It is so bad before Monday morning as to be very sickly and nauseating; and the larger the city grows, the worse this evil will be.”26 A local doctor noted that the city’s well water so commonly caused diarrhea that it could be considered a cure for constipation, a “virtue derived from the neighboring sinks [cesspools]” and to “certain saline properties, which render it peculiarly efficacious in certain complaints.”
In 1831, scientists from the New York Academy of Sciences (then known as the Lyceum of Natural History) found that compared to fresh river water from upstate, which held just shy of 130 milligrams of organic and inorganic material in each gallon, the city’s well waters were positively semisolid, rich with more than 8,000 milligrams of debris per gallon. The water, even a former director of the Manhattan Company had to admit in 1810, was rich with its users’ “own evacuations, as well as that of their Horses, Cows, Dogs, Cats and other putrid liquids so plentifully dispensed.”27
Of course, New Yorkers didn’t know that their polluted waters could transmit deadly diseases. But they did know that it tasted bad, so they rarely drank water straight. They turned it into beer or they added liquor, like gin, or they boiled it to make tea or coffee. Besides making the water more palatable, these preparations destroyed the fecal microbes in it. They could even kill cholera vibrio. At 20 percent concentration, gin can kill cholera vibrio in an hour’s time. Vibrio perish in hot drinks, too.28
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the groundwater below that was contaminated with fecal matter. It was also the surface waters: the waters that lapped at the shores, flooded over the island, and stagnated in puddles on New Yorkers’ streets and in their cellars.
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Ironically, the contamination of the city’s surface waters began with the voluntary attempt, on the part of some of the more wealthy residents, to clean their privies.
This practice could have helped clean up the drinking-water supply, except that the most convenient place to dump the contents of their privies was in the rivers. Because locals found the practice smelly and unsightly, city regulations required that the dumping occur at night. (This is how human waste came to be called “night soil.”) That regulation made the process even messier than it would have been otherwise. The odiferous loads were ferried to the piers over dark cobblestoned streets on rickety horse-drawn wagons, spilling their contents along the way. Once the wagons got to the piers, they sometimes dumped their loads directly on unseen vessels moored nearby. “Small boats which may happen to be within reach of the avalanche are either wholly or partially filled,” the city inspector reported in 1842, “and instances are said to have occurred of their being carried to the bottom with their unnatural load.”29
Worse than the mess on the streets was the waste that collected underwater in giant mountains. Under more amenable geographic conditions, the dumped privy waste would have been flushed out to sea by the tides and currents. But the waters around the island of Manhattan were stagnant and the land marshy. While the downstream currents of the Hudson and East Rivers pushed water southward away from the island, the Atlantic tides pushed it back toward the island. One result was that the city had to regularly dredge the slips in order to keep them navigable. Another was the continuous contamination of the river’s waters, as the submerged piles of waste enriched them with nutrients ideal for the growth of bacteria. “Where the sun fell on it, it was literally effervescing,” a local noted in 1839, the river’s waters “actually sending up streams of large bubbles from the putrefying corruption at the bottom.”30
Residents were regularly exposed to the contaminated waters in their rivers. There was little distinction on the island of Manhattan between the land and the waters around it. (Geographically, Manhattan and its surrounding islands were the temperate equivalent of the Sundarbans. Both consisted of low-lying archipelagos situated in the middle of estuaries.) Even before the city had been established, the low-lying, narrow island had been regularly inundated by the sea. The Lenape, the island’s original inhabitants, who’d been displaced by the Dutch, had been able to paddle their canoes from one side straight to the other at high tide. In the winters, ice skaters could glide from today’s City Hall to Greenwich Village and out to the Hudson.
But while the original inhabitants of the island could escape the floodwater, because it quickly drained back to the sea, nineteenth-century inhabitants couldn’t. War and urban development had razed the high ground and blocked the streams and canals that might have carried floodwaters away. After the Revolutionary War, nearly half of the island’s trees had been burned down, in forest fires and in the frenzy of rebuilding that occurred afterward. The island, wrote George Washington in 1781, was “totally stripped of Trees, & wood of every kind.” The only thing left was “low bushes.” The northern part of the island, which had been dotted with more than five hundred distinct hills (inspiration for the Lenape name for the island, “Mannahatta,” or “Island of Many Hills”), was flattened. Bunker Hill, which had once risen behind the Collect Pond, had been leveled. Streams, canals, and ditches that might have drained the floodwaters were either choked with garbage or paved over.31
The worst flooding occurred in the many low-lying, sinking properties that had been “reclaimed” from the sea. The city had sold parcels of sea and pond called “water lots” to entrepreneurs, who displaced the water and constructed housing atop it. More than 130 acres of land around the coasts had been thus reclaimed, turning the once pointy tip of Manhattan into a rounded arc.32 So had the site of the former Collect Pond.33 But these reclaimed acres weren’t stable like those underlain with Manhattan’s bedrock. The lots had been filled with garbage and soil, which compressed and shifted under the weight of the buildings constructed atop them, like loose gravel under a heavy brick. As the fill compressed, the properties themselves sank.
And so for most residents there was no avoiding the floodwaters when they washed over the city’s streets twice daily with the tides. The polluted water festered in puddles and collected in their cellars and yards. It gurgled through the streets and trickled into wells. Inevitably, with excreta-contaminated surface waters all around their homes, and excreta-contaminated groundwaters filling their wells, human waste found its way into New Yorkers’ bodies. All a pathogen like Vibrio cholerae had to do was finagle a ride into town.
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Drought descended upon Manhattan during the spring of 1832. The island’s fragile groundwater resources shriveled, increasing the relative propor
tion of nutrient-rich filth to fresh water. The rivers grew brinier, the sun beating down triggering blooms of plankton and the tiny floating copepods that fed on them.
Cholera arrived that summer.
The first reported cases began in encounters with the waste-enriched, plankton-choked rivers. On June 25, on the east side of the island, a tailor named Fitzgerald, who lived on the first floor of a house on Cherry Street near the East River, boarded a ferry bound across the river to Brooklyn. He sickened with cholera and infected his two children and wife, all of whom perished. A few days later, two miles away, on the west side of the island, a man named O’Neil, in a drunken stupor, fell into the Hudson River. Cholera killed him, too. At the same time, cholera struck a fishing vessel moored in the East River, just south of Cherry Street, as well as at 15 James Slip and on Oliver Street, at the time both waterfront properties on the East River within a couple blocks of Cherry.34
Cholera vibrio from those early victims’ guts quickly spread into the city’s drinking-water supply. It was so hot that summer that some New Yorkers drank plain water by the glass despite its universally despised taste. Each glass could invisibly hold 200 million cholera vibrios.35 And while special preparations could kill cholera vibrio, corrupt vendors and bartenders could undo those protections. Penny-pinching vendors commonly diluted the milk they sold with water, and in cheap dives, bartenders diluted the alcoholic drinks with water, too. When New Yorkers drank their hot teas and coffees with water-diluted milk, or consumed diluted cocktails, they could get a deadly dose of cholera.36 (While a 20 percent gin cocktail killed cholera vibrio in an hour, a 15 percent gin cocktail wasn’t strong enough for the job.)37 Those who didn’t drink straight water or diluted hot drinks and cocktails were exposed through various food items. Oysters, a dozen of which were cheaper than a single hot dog, were likely sources of cholera contamination, as were fruits and vegetables that had been splattered with contaminated water when the city’s markets were washed down.38 Contaminated water distributed by the Manhattan Company was widely shared. New Yorkers filled their buckets at the taps and hauled it to their tenement apartments to share with their neighbors. Grocers gave it away for free to passengers on ships and to their customers, to drum up business.39
Whole families perished from cholera. At one makeshift cholera hospital, a husband and wife, the wife’s mother, the son, the servant, and an uncle all died within four days of each other. At the foot of Warren Street, beside the Hudson, a shocked passerby wrote of a “filthy and wretched” underground apartment, where he found a child “writhing in pain, next to a pile of bed clothes.” Five of the residents of the apartment had already died and their bodies had been carted away, leaving just the child and his mother. When the child was asked where his mother was, he pointed to the pile of rags next to him, where surprised physicians found her dead body.40
People who lived on reclaimed lands were especially hard hit. The residents of the Five Points slum built atop the filled-in Collect Pond were mostly poor immigrants and African Americans. Many ended up in makeshift cholera hospitals. At one such hospital, more than half died.41
The disease staggered the city’s physicians. One reported of his examination of a couple in the throes of cholera in their home. The bed and linens were “saturated with a clear odourless liquid,” and while the woman screamed incessantly for water, the man beside her lay prostrate as the doctor reached out to take his pulse. “The touch of the skin, so unlike that which I had ever felt before, though I have attended the death bed of many, thrilled me with horror,” he wrote. “I could not believe that I had laid my hand on a yet breathing body.” The hands of the doomed duo were wrinkled, like a “person who had been washing,” the doctor wrote, “or perhaps still more those of a person who had been dead for many days.”42
They comforted themselves that the disease seemed to preferentially strike areas of “a low, dirty, and unhealthy character, consisting chiefly of confined narrow streets, and dirty dwellings, inhabited by the poorest and lowest part of the population,” as one put it at the time. But insofar as that was true, it was only because most prosperous New Yorkers had fled the stricken city. If given the opportunity, cholera slayed the wealthy as efficiently as it did the poor, killing a member of the city council and the daughter of the fur magnate John Jacob Astor, at the time the richest man in the United States. Wealthy people lived on reclaimed lands, too. In the grand house at 26 Broad Street, which had once been an inlet of the East River, three women and four nurses and servants—“young, healthy, and temperate women,” their physician reported—died within days of each other. So did a four-year-old child who’d been brought to the house for an overnight stay. Each victim, physicians noted at the time, had “slept or were habitually employed in the basement rooms.” Clusters of cases similarly emerged among prosperous New Yorkers living at the foot of Duane Street, and on Vestry and Desbrosses Streets, in what is now TriBeCa, built on land reclaimed from the Hudson.43
Soon, cholera was taking more than a hundred lives every day, raging violently in one-quarter of the city “until it appeared to have exhausted all its subjects,” as a mystified New York city physician put it, and then emerging “immediately in some other, and perhaps quite distant part.”44 “I am not able to walk to St. Mark’s Place,” one resident wrote to her daughters, whom she’d sent out of town while the cholera raged. “The Cholera is all we hear and think about … It continues its dreadful ravages with unabated vigor.”45 “There was scarcely a morning, for two months,” noted another diarist, a shopkeeper who lived on Cortlandt Street, “that I did not meet on Broadway from three to six ambulances, with cholera patients on their way to the hospital.”46
By mid-July, the city had ground to a halt, silent and still save for the sound of carts transporting corpses to the cemeteries and the drifting smoke from the burning of the clothes and bedding of the dead.47 Stores had closed their doors and the city had canceled its usual Fourth of July festivities. “The disease is here in all its violence and will increase,” former mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary. “God grant that its ravages may be confined and its visit short!”48
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To those of us who’ve grown up with indoor-plumbing systems that capture every last drop of excreta in gleaming porcelain portals and flush it miles away, the waste management crisis that engulfed nineteenth-century New York seems a curiosity from another world. But it isn’t. The sanitary revolution that replaced privies and latrines with flush toilets and running water has been selective and only partially implemented. And because pathogens that enjoy transmission opportunities in one corner of the world can easily spread elsewhere, in certain ways we are as threatened today by pathogens that spread by feculence as we were almost two hundred years ago.
While Western attitudes toward human excreta have radically changed since the days of poudrette, our attitudes toward animal excreta remain relatively cavalier. For example, in the United States, where dog ownership is common, many consider dog feces harmless. That’s why many communities allow resident pets to defecate at will in streets, yards, and parks, and dog owners think nothing of walking for miles with thin plastic bags of dog feces swinging casually at their sides. A worker in the garden center at Home Depot confided to me that he planted his award-winning tomato plants in the stuff. According to one survey, 44 percent of dog owners make no attempt to collect or contain their dog’s waste, explaining that dog poo acts as a fertilizer.49
As a result, dog waste deposited on sidewalks and yards sinks into soils, wafts into the air, and washes into waterways. About a third of the bacterial contamination in U.S. waterways originates in dog waste, and such contamination is more common in residential areas where dogs live than in commercial areas. (Scientists call this phenomenon the “Fido Hypothesis.”)50 It’s in the air, too. One study of outdoor air pollution in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit found that during the winter when trees are leafless (and therefore not exuding bacteria into the air), the major
ity of the aerosolized bacteria comes from dog feces.51
But far from being a harmless source of fertilizer, dog feces is both an environmental contaminant (and is classified as such by the Environmental Protection Agency) and a source of pathogens that can infect people. Like human excreta, dog poo teems with pathogenic microbes, such as strains of E. coli, roundworms, and other parasites. One of the most common parasitic infections in Americans is the result of their exposure to dog feces. The dog roundworm Toxocara canis is common in dogs and, because of the ubiquity of dog feces, widespread in the environment. It can contaminate soil and water for years. Kids pick up the parasite when they play in contaminated soil and inadvertently put their hands in their mouths. Although it’s rarely diagnosed, since there’s no easily available, effective diagnostic test for it, one recent survey found that 14 percent of Americans over the age of six were infected. In humans, Toxocara canis has been linked to asthma and a range of neurological effects.52 Dogs can also carry the tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis, which in humans causes a disease that resembles liver cancer. The infection is a growing problem in Switzerland, Alaska, and parts of China.53
This casual disregard for the microbial potency of pet excreta extends to the waste of livestock. Parents who purchase diaper wipes in bulk to rid the last trace of human feces from their children’s bodies don’t balk when, on visits to the farm and the state fair, their kids are led over walkways as caked with excreta as the streets of nineteenth-century New York. And we allow the livestock we eat to live in conditions that would be considered medieval if people were subjected to them. The chicken coop, the pigpen, the rabbit hutch—all are piles of excreta with animals sleeping and living on top.