Taming Manhattan

Catherine McNeur

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674745148
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History
VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America
Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library
James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American RepublicWith pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today's sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this environmental history of Gotham, a battle to control the boundaries between city and country was already being waged, and the winners would take dramatic steps to outlaw New York's wild side."[A] fine book which make[s] a real contribution to urban biography."
—Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement "Tells an odd story in lively prose…The city McNeur depicts in Taming Manhattan is the pestiferous obverse of the belle epoque city of Henry James and Edith Wharton that sits comfortably in many imaginations…[ Taming Manhattan ] is a smart book that engages in the old­ fashioned business of trying to harvest lessons for the present from the past."
—Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times

1

Mad Dogs and Loose Hogs

On a sunny spring day in 1817, a New Yorker stepped out of his house to enjoy a stroll through the city. Along his route he experienced “sufferings and mortifications” that would have embarrassed any metropolis but had become increasingly common in Manhattan. First, he found a cluster of nine hogs cavorting about the street, along with “several smaller congregations.” The smells were too much to bear. As if this were not painful enough, he “was twice docked by chamber-maids cleaning windows … and once inundated by a grocer emptying his moptub on the pavement.” Looking for a country escape from all this chaos, he wandered to the upper part of Broadway, where he encountered a wooden shanty blocking the street, “rendering passage equally disagreeable and dangerous.” Disregarding the laws governing public spaces, the owner of the “miserable old hulk” had erected his home less than a week before, “obstruct[ing] and deform[ing] the principal avenue of this great city.” After his disappointing walk, the New Yorker returned to his home that night exhausted. However, as soon as he lay down to sleep, his rest was disturbed by “the discordant notes of a concert of bull-dogs.” Sleep-deprived, he composed a letter describing his frustration with the city’s nuisances and sent it to the conservative New-York Evening Post, hoping to rally the support of other New Yorkers and shame the municipal government into taking control and enforcing its ordinances governing public space. Whether or not he dramatized or condensed his experiences to make his argument stronger, the author was annoyed with what had become typical nuisances in one of the foremost cities of the country.¹

One man’s nuisance, of course, was another’s livelihood or even cherished pet. Livestock, such as the foul-smelling hogs the letter writer encountered, helped to feed New York’s poorest residents. The dogs that howled at night were a mix of strays, beloved companions, watchdogs, and hunting dogs. The owners took advantage of the filthy condition of the streets to find free food for their animals. With the municipal government struggling to keep up with the growing city, the streets were left in disarray, which allowed for the creation of this de facto urban commons where animals grazed freely. Yet New Yorkers like the author of the letter, who had other visions for what the city might become, fought to have the “corporation” (as New Yorkers called their government) close the commons once and for all, in order to make the streets cleaner, more convenient, and ultimately respectable. With such strong feelings on both sides about how the streets ought to be used, political debates remained extremely contentious.

Just over a week before the Evening Post published this letter, the outgoing members of the Common Council took advantage of their impending exit to pass a number of controversial laws and ordinances, including a ban on loose dogs and hogs. Similar laws had been on the books previously but had met with resistance from owners and were rarely, if ever, enforced by the police. The Common Council regularly tinkered with the laws hoping to find the key to the city’s problems. However, the lack of enforcement continued, to the chagrin of our letter writer. In the opinion of many who sympathized with him, Manhattan seemed to be an ungovernable space riddled with unpleasant nuisances and ineffective politicians.²

FIGURE 1. Baron von Klinckowström, Broadway and City Hall, New York, 1820. Hogs and dogs mingle with carriages, carts, and pedestrians on Broadway right in front of City Hall. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society.)

New York’s uncontrollable growth was partly to blame for the chaos on the streets. Immigration to New York from the countryside and from Europe picked up rapidly in 1815, after the end of the War of 1812. New York was in the process of intensive urbanization, and the municipal government had a hard time keeping up. Not only were there more people around to own animals, but those people were also creating more garbage that, left uncollected on the streets, fed a burgeoning, free-roaming animal population. The battles that erupted over animals in the streets exacerbated tensions among New Yorkers over class, race, and national origin. As wealthier, native-born New Yorkers began wringing their hands about the fate of the city, they typically tied the chaos of the animals to impoverished newcomers. To them, the city seemed to be declining rapidly.

While it might not have appeared so to its critics, New York’s municipal government had adapted somewhat to the city’s growth. The completion of a monumental new City Hall in 1812 marked a period of significant growth for the municipal government. The building testified to the government’s expanding role in controlling the city’s public spaces and consequently its population. While the government had long focused on New York’s commercial needs, it was increasingly turning its attention toward the services necessary to maintain the public’s welfare. By the end of the War of 1812, the city had begun to parcel out responsibility to more departments and administrators, in an attempt to expand urban services. Yet the government struggled to stay on top of these tasks. City officials touted their efforts to manage public markets, docks, and commerce; maintain order; keep the streets clean, in good repair, and lit at night; and safeguard public health. Unfortunately, they had a difficult time doing any of these tasks well.³

Success was difficult for several reasons. The councilmen, for instance, were overworked and had few incentives to improve government efficiency. During this era, representatives were primarily patricians rather than career politicians, and wealthy enough to afford unpaid government positions. Many continued their legal and mercantile work after being elected, convening once a week for Common Council meetings. It was not particularly surprising, then, that these part-time representatives could not meet the needs of a rapidly growing city, let alone restructure the government to be more efficient and effective. New York City had the largest population-to-councilman ratio among contemporary American cities. In 1830 the ratio was a remarkable 14,471 New Yorkers per councilman, more than three times higher than that of its nearest competitor, Philadelphia. These councilmen had to represent the interests and needs of a vast and dramatically changing population—responsibilities too enormous for their part-time positions.⁴

The municipal government expanded to handle the growing needs and complications of the city, but an increased number of departments did not always mean better services. As a measure of the corporation’s growth, between 1800 and 1840 city expenses increased twenty-four-fold. The government’s growth sometimes resulted in overlapping jurisdictions, as was the case in the handling of public health and nuisance issues such as loose animals. In fact, the disorderly expansion often caused more confusion, less efficiency, and continued issues with the enforcement of laws. While the city’s commerce and culture thrived, its public spaces suffered from ineffective ordinances and impotent leadership. Those New Yorkers who relied on the urban commons to supplement their incomes benefited directly from this chaos.⁵

The inability of New York’s government to control its public spaces had major implications for the fate of free-roaming animals. Citizens held enormous power over the success of any laws that politicians passed about these animals. Given that New Yorkers were so divided over how public space ought to be used, this resulted in intense battles that both exposed and amplified class and racial tensions. In many ways, the animals came to symbolize their owners in these debates. Characterizations of the animals served as a means for New Yorkers to either criticize or praise their owners. The ways New Yorkers classified and understood these animals played an important role in their treatment and the debates that resulted. While both free-roaming dogs and hogs were classified as domestic animals, they were actually half-wild. These animals foraged on their own and bred with other animals on the streets; they were in many ways beyond the control of their owners, let alone that of politicians and city employees. Yet while dogs and hogs were in many ways similar, the various ways New Yorkers treated them reflected not only their respective statuses as pets and livestock, but also their association with specific groups of New Yorkers.

The municipal government struggled to catch up with its growing constituency and gain control of the city’s free-roaming animals, but its attempts were unpopular and often failed. Balancing a desire to polish a growing city with a reluctance to burden an impoverished lower class, city leaders half-heartedly enforced laws or completely ignored them—that is, when they had the power to enforce them at all. Those like the letter writer resorted to penning frustrated articles or tongue-in-cheek humor pieces for newspapers that mocked the inefficient city government while also begging for reform. They worried about how New York could ever compare to London or Paris, let alone Boston or Philadelphia, when dogs and hogs ruled the streets. Though Boston and Philadelphia were not exempt from loose animals, they controlled them far more effectively, and New York’s journalists often wrote enviously of their cleaner streets. At the same time, those New Yorkers who owned the animals and relied on their ability to use the streets as a public commons fretted over the implications of losing these rights. The stakes were high for both groups. Newspaper campaigns, heated Common Council debates, and a number of riots would help to define the future of New York’s urban environment and public spaces.⁶

Mad Dogs

New York’s canine residents had long faced trouble on the city streets. Regular panics washed over the city, instilling fear that mad dogs were on the loose and eager to infect innocent passersby—both pets and humans—with rabies. These four-legged, foaming terrorists inspired fearful newspaper stories that helped to rally support for restricting dogs’ ability to roam the streets freely. Yet not all New Yorkers supported this universal ban, let alone the government-sponsored slaughter of all dogs found at large. City residents, rich and poor, owned these animals and considered them pets, guard dogs, or hunting companions.⁷

Though strays, known as “tramps,” made up a good number of the free-roaming dogs, New Yorker’s pets often mingled with them indiscriminately on the sidewalks. In an era before flea and tick control, dogs typically had to stay outdoors, especially during the summer, in order to keep their owners pest free. While some owners kept their dogs chained in yards, others let them out to roam the city and mix with dogs of all classes and ranks. Middle- and upper-class dogs were typically fed table scraps, but they, too, joined the lower-class dogs in foraging among the city’s heaps of garbage. The animals and their owners took advantage of the bounty left on the streets due to the city’s ineffective garbage removal contracts. This urban commons was filled with ripe piles of organic matter, such as offal and kitchen waste, so dogs and other free-roaming animals could essentially find their entire day’s diet within a few blocks of their residence.⁸

To those who feared death by dog bite—a fear fueled by word-of-mouth stories and newspaper accounts—the origin and pedigree of these dogs did not matter. In the opinion of such people, all dogs, especially those left to wander freely through public spaces, posed a threat to the lives and well-being of New Yorkers. Reports of rabies outbreaks came primarily from newspapers, which inspired terror by emphasizing the unknown factors in the contagion. It was impossible to know the exact number of dogs on the streets, let alone the number of those infected, as the dogs were nomadic and therefore uncontrollable and uncountable. Rabies was also difficult to diagnose in the offending dogs, mainly because they ran off after biting their victim. Bystanders felt justified in tagging particularly aggressive or erratic dogs as “mad.” Without having reliable information about the attackers, every dog bite victim could worry about the possibility of rabies. Savvy salesmen marketed a series of potions that claimed to cure hydrophobia if taken prior to its onset. The long delay before victims developed signs of the fatal disease left many imagining symptoms and panicking. “Epidemic terror” infected more people than rabies itself and inspired some to support drastic measures, such as banning or even killing all urban canines.⁹

However rare dog attacks and the incidence of rabies were in reality, the newspaper reports that built up their presence made them a larger symbol of the breakdown of civility. The streets, like the dogs, were uncontrollable and lives were placed at risk. Critics associated rabies with disorder and considered loose dogs to be a kind of pollution that could spread and contaminate, challenging the purity of New York’s public spaces and its citizenry. In the absence of clear medical solutions, government policy was necessary to purify the streets and maintain order.¹⁰

For decades, the Common Council passed law after law restricting dogs’ access to the streets following various outbreaks. Such laws, instituted in 1785, 1802, 1803, and 1808, ultimately proved to be ineffective, though they temporarily mollified alarmed residents. In 1811, however, fear over rabies was growing as newspapers continually reported the deaths of people both locally and nationally from dog bites. New Yorkers, fearful to walk down the street lest they encounter an uncontrollable dog, wrote to newspapers and petitioned the city government. A petition from 1,347 New Yorkers helped to solidify the Common Council’s position, and on the very day it was read, the aldermen passed the most effective law to date.¹¹

The 1811 “Law Concerning Dogs” was effective because it created the job of Dog Register and Collector, an official who was given significant monetary incentive to collect a new, $3 tax from each dog owner and kill all dogs found roaming at large. The councilmen appointed Abner Curtis, a police marshal, to the position. He pocketed 20 percent of the tax and 50 cents for every dog he or his employees killed and buried. The law permitted anyone to kill free-roaming dogs outside the Lamp District (the very dense downtown area), as well as any dog that bit or attempted to bite a person or animal on the street. Predicting resistance from dog owners, the law established a steep fine of $30 for those who tried to “hinder or molest” the Register or his staff when they carried out their business.¹²

In establishing the 1811 dog law, the aldermen had decided to create the new post of Dog Register rather than incorporate the responsibility for monitoring loose canines under the City Inspector’s jurisdiction. A state law of 1807 had created the position of City Inspector. The job entailed investigating and removing nuisances, as well as protecting and monitoring the public health. Though the dog law was written specifically in response to concerns about rabies, the Common Council saw fit to keep it separate. Perhaps they did this because they classified dogs apart from other nuisances, since dogs were pets; or perhaps they did it because they wanted to design a position where the pay itself was dependent on the number of dogs taxed and killed, thereby establishing an incentive to enforce the law, something they would have ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Mad Dogs and Loose Hogs
• 2. Unequally Green
• 3. The Dung Heap of the Universe
• 4. Hog Wash and Swill Milk
• 5. Clearing the Lungs of the City
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index