Filthy Cities – Industrial New York

New York City. “The Capital of the World” to some, “The City So Nice They Named It Twice” to others, but most importantly, the city people escape to in hopes of pursuing the American Dream. However, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, New York City was not as upstanding or charming as it is today. The documentary Filthy Cities: Industrial New York by Andy Robbins, produced by BBC, portrays the struggles poor immigrants faced when arriving in New York City. Fleeing persecution and poverty in their previous countries, what they faced in NYC was even worse. From money-grubbing landlords, repulsive slums, and cramped tenements, immigrants had to fight disease, corruption, exploitation, parasites, and many more grueling conditions. It is appalling, the nightmarish circumstances the immigrants desperately tried to withstand, with many of them not making it out alive. For New York to continue as a city, various people, like inventors and reformers, would have to step up with inventions, ideas, and reformation.

The Irish, one of the first immigrants to arrive, were fleeing the potato famine in hopes of new and improved lives in New York City. However, if they did not die on board the ships, New York would be the end for many. These poor immigrants were abused by bigoted slum landlords, or slumlords, and packed into buildings with no heating, sewers, or running water. These landlords would instantly have them pay rent by force or threats. As demand for tenements rose with more and more immigrants, families were packed into rooms that were not capable of supporting that many people. With increased rent, their apartments also became their workplaces, with people making clothes, shoes, and hats. For everyone in an apartment, there were just three privies to share, along with their animals some kept inside. On top of that, the streets were heaped with animal waste, garbage, human feces, and mud. This muck can otherwise be known as “corporation pudding.” With these unhygienic issues in living spaces and outside streets, disease had the ultimate opportunity and center to generate.

Without indoor plumbing or sewers, the poor had the same putrid privies and were increasingly drowning in their own filth, literally. As New York became congested with people and progressively contaminated, disease started taking effect. For example, cholera, one of the first waterborne outbreaks, spread through the slums and started to impact the whole city. It left many dead, with bodies starting to pile onto streets. As if things could not get worse, parasites started infesting slums. Bedbugs had uncomfortable, irritating bites that often became infected. In addition to bedbugs, there was body lice, which was quite deadly, crawling from one person to another. In their guts, body lice carried typhus, a disease often killing its victim within two weeks. Countless immigrants died from disease, but that was not a worry for the city, for there were new arrivals of immigrants to replace each death. Apart from the elite people of the city who did not even blink an eye to the outrageous deaths of immigrants and the poor, there was Dr. Stephen Smith.

“One young doctor decided it was time to get to grips with the city's endemic filth and epidemic injustice.” Dr. Stephen Smith was deeply disturbed when he realized all his typhus patients had the same address, living in the same foul tenement building. An unreasonable amount of these sick immigrants were cramped into this nauseating building, practically rotting away. Dr. Smith even wrote, “The whole establishment was reeking with filth and the atmosphere was heavy with the sickening odor of the deadly typhus, which reigned supreme in every room.” Dr. Smith then took it into his own hands to confront the landlord, but to no avail. Not letting that discourage him, he started campaigning to legally force wealthy landlords to clean up their slums, which he would soon realize would be exceedingly difficult because of New York’s corrupted system of government. For example, the man in charge, William Boss Tweed, was stealing millions of dollars from the city. Then, there came a report of another outbreak of cholera on its way from Europe, and Smith knew it would infect the slums first and spread out into the city. With the city now frightened, the first independent Board of Health was established, and Smith was given the job of stopping cholera before it would destroy the city again. Manure, human feces, and dead horses and animals were removed from the streets; wherever cholera was reported, Smith ensured residents were quarantined. Once cholera came to the city, ten times less residents died compared to the previous outbreak, a definite success. New York City and its inhabitants began to realize the connection between dirt and disease, and in the coming years, new technologies would rise, helping the city prosper.

One of the first major and most expensive engineering projects for New York was the goal of obtaining fresh water. With disease and even fires, New York set out on getting millions of gallons of fresh, clean water into the city everyday. To effectively do this, they dammed the Croton River that lies north of New York and built an aqueduct to channel the water. Now with available fresh water, plumbers starting installing indoor bathrooms, for the rich of course. Taps, toiletries, toilet paper and toilets became manufactured as well. With waste water now being produced, sewers also had to be built. Thomas Edison perfected the lightbulb, successfully discontinuing the use of the poisonous gas lamps. Furthermore, two different types of automobiles were joined together to supersede the use of horses and their tons of manure. Changing housework forever, the Hoover vacuum was being sold door to door by salesmen and “making it safe to be hungry,” Edison’s general electric refrigerator was becoming more affordable to everyone with mass production.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, New York was nothing but a dream: a place where people could go and pursue healthier, fruitful lives and prosper in the city of capitalism. However, when reality hit, that dream became a nightmare. A nightmare where immigrants were demoralized, manipulated, and attacked by sickness and parasites. Parasites ranged from bed bugs and body lice, to avaricious slumlords. Slumlords who would cheat and degrade poor immigrants with rent prices, inhumane living conditions, and overcrowded tenement buildings. Death, disease, feces, and garbage plagued New York, and if it was not for reformers and inventors with campaigns and projects, who knows what New York would be today.