From the chapter "Death of the Organic City" in Ted Steinberg's newly
published "Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History":
Before 1880 it was not the least bit unusual to walk out into the
streets of Atlanta and find cows. In 1881, however, the city's
political leaders decided that bovines were no longer welcome. The
cows could come home, as the saying goes, but not to the streets of
Atlanta-not after the city council passed a law making it illegal for
cattle to roam the town. Apparently a large number of working people,
who depended on the animals as a source of milk and meat, objected to
the ordinance. A man named J. D. Garrison denounced the law as little
more than a thinly veiled attempt at class warfare. "I speak the
feelings of every man when I say this is the dictation of a codfish
aristocracy," he said. "It is an issue between flowers and
milk-between the front yard of the rich man and the sustenance of the
poor family."
The large animals that once wandered the streets of urban America are
of course long gone. Finding out how and why they disappeared means
taking a journey back to the late nineteenth century, to the
Progressive Era, when cities across the nation underwent a major
cleanup.
While conservationists put the countryside in order, another group of
reformers trained their sights on urban areas. In 1869, only nine
cities had populations exceeding 100,000; in 1890, 28 had reached
that mark. A third of all Americans now lived in such places. New
York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, and Baltimore, in
that order, were the nation's largest population centers, filled with
immigrants who worked producing apparel, forging steel, and packing
meat. Crammed with people and factories, in addition to the pigs,
horses, mules, cattle, and goats used for food and transport, the
city emerged by the late nineteenth century as a dark and filthy
place. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, in his novel The Jungle, captured
the enormity of the problem, describing the "strange, pungent odor"
people smelled as they approached Chicago's stockyards-a stench "you
could literally taste"-and the chimneys belching out smoke that was
"thick, oily, and black as night."
Enter such Progressive Era reformers as Jane Addams, Robert Woods,
and Florence Kelley, people who fervently felt that the creation of a
clean and healthful environment, not genetic predisposition as had
formerly been believed, could defend against ignorance and
criminality. Taking their cue from the British, they formed
settlement houses, most famously Hull House, established by Addams in
Chicago in 1889-the model for some 400 such community institutions
nationwide. The settlement houses engaged in a host of efforts to
improve the lives of slum dwellers, setting up kindergartens and
sponsoring everything from health-clinics to music studios to
playgrounds. In 1894, Addams herself, in an effort to lower the
mortality rate in one ward, led a group of immigrant women from Hull
House on a nightly inspection designed to check up on the work of the
city's garbage collectors.
As important as the sanitary reforms were-especially the improved
water and sewer systems that led to a decline in disease-they came at
a cost. All dirt is not equally bad; cleaner cities are not
necessarily better for everyone. Indeed, there were some virtues to
the filth. Life in the "organic city," a place swarming with pigs and
horses and steeped in mountains of manure, was dirty, but it also had
a certain social and environmental logic.
Today we rarely associate big animals with urban areas, with the
possible exception of the horse-and-buggy tour. In the nineteenth
century, however, it would be impossible to imagine such places
without the creatures that roamed the streets, not to mention the
stinking piles of excrement they left behind. In these days before
municipal trash collection, working-class women fed their families
with pigs that fattened on city garbage. Horses carried people and
goods, hauled pumps to help put out fires, and even produced power
for manufacturing such things as bricks and lumber. Horse manure,
meanwhile, did not go to waste. It streamed into surrounding
vegetable farms, where it bolstered soil fertility. Even a good deal
of human waste, which piled up in privies and cesspools in the days
before sanitary sewers, found its way to the rural hinterlands. City
dwellers and their animals were largely integrated into the regional
soil cycle, supplying it with the nutrients for growing food that was
then trucked back into town. Thus did life proceed in the organic
city, with vegetables and hay flowing one way and waste the other.
In the late nineteenth century, reformers bent on sanitation put an
end to the city in its down-to-earth form. They drove the pigs out,
forcing the working class to rely more on the cash economy for food,
and substituted municipal garbage collectors for the hogs. They
replaced horses with electric streetcars, ending the city's role as a
manure factory and stimulating nearby vegetable farmers to turn to
artificial fertilizers. They built sewerage systems that carried
waste off into lakes, rivers, and harbors, eliminating the privies
and the "night soil" men who had delivered the excrement to the
countryside-distancing urbanites from the land they had once helped
to enrich. Overall, public health unproved. But the poor were left to
fend for themselves in the wage economy as the urban commons-akin to
the open range in the South and West- vanished. Public health indeed
had its virtues, but it also had some important social and ecological
tradeoffs.
WALKING SEWERS
When Europeans visualized America in the nineteenth century, they
thought of Native Americans, a strange new group of people unknown on
their continent. But when they pictured American cities, it was not
Indians and buffaloes but pigs that came to mind. No animal loomed
larger in their image of U.S. urban areas. "I have not yet found any
city, county, or town where I have not seen these lovable animals
wandering about peacefully in huge herds," wrote Ole Munch Raeder, a
Norwegian lawyer on a visit to America in 1847. Swine, he observed,
kept the streets clean by "eating up all kinds of refuse. And then,
when these walking sewers are properly filled up they are butchered
and provide a real treat for the dinner-table."
Working-class women, who depended on pigs to supply food for the
table, allowed them to scavenge the urban commons for garbage. While
rural hogs fed on the forest's acorns, city pigs fed on the waste
people threw away, converting it into protein for the working poor.
But a food source to some proved a nuisance to others. So many pigs
wandered the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, at mid-century that,
according to one newspaper report, they had come "to dispute the side
walks with other persons." These creatures were not the sedate
porkers one encounters today at the zoo; they were wild animals that
injured and occasionally killed children. A nasty and brutish lot,
the urban pigs copulated in public and had the annoying habit of
defecating on people.
The authorities in New York City had sought to ban swine from the
streets as early as the 1810s. But public outcry led to the
prohibition's repeal. In 1818, however, a grand jury indicted two men
for the misdemeanor of "keeping and permitting to run hogs at large
in the city of New York." The first of the accused was convicted,
after failing to mount a defense of his actions, and forced to pay a
small fee. The second man, a butcher named Christian Harriet, decided
to fight the charge. "The dandies, who are too delicate to endure the
sight, or even the idea of so odious a creature," might welcome a
conviction, Harriet's lawyers argued. "But many poor families might
experience far different sensations, and be driven to beggary or the
Alms House for a portion of that subsistence of which a conviction in
this case would deprive them." Closing the urban commons, in other
words, would take food out of the mouths of the poor.
"It is said, that if we restrain swine from running in the street, we
shall injure the poor," Mayor Cadwallader Colden observed. "Why,
gentlemen! must we feed the poor at the expense of human flesh," he
asked? Eliminate the commons and the poor would be forced to find
jobs to pay for food, instead of taking their meals at the expense of
the city's more refined residents. As for the fact that swine played
a useful part in cleaning up the city's streets, Colden intoned, "I
think our corporation will not employ brutal agency for that object
when men can be got to do it."
In the end, Harriet was convicted. As of 1819, setting pigs free
became a crime, but that did not deter people. In 1821, city
authorities went to war against the pigs, taking many into custody as
Irish and black women banded together to defend the animals. Other
significant pig-related conflicts erupted in 1825, 1826, 1830. and
1832. Pigs played a central role in the lives of the poor, who were
willing to do what they could to save them.
In 1849, however, the urban commons experienced a fatal blow. Cholera
broke out in New York, and health officials linked the outbreak to
the city's filthy conditions. No animal symbolized dirt more clearly
than the pig. Police, armed with clubs, drove thousands of swine out
of cellars and garrets, banishing them uptown. By 1860, the area
below 86th Street had been secured as a pig-free zone. But in the
uptown wards, the pigs still ruled. So many hogs roamed the area
around 125th Street in Harlem at mid-century that the area came to be
known as Pig's Alley. City authorities in New York and other urban
areas, meanwhile, continued to tolerate pigsties as late as the
1870s, with some tenement residents even boarding them in their
rooms, demonstrating the importance the poor attached to the animal.
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the urban commons drew
to a close not just in New York, but in cities throughout America.
Mayor Colden's wish for a pig-free city, one where women could walk
the streets "without encountering the most disgusting spectacles of
these animals indulging the propensities of nature," seemed well
within reach. The urban pig was ultimately exiled to the farmyard,
where, to this day, it perpetuates for people the division between
the country and the city.
CITY AS MANURE FACTORY
Like the pig, the horse also played an important, if somewhat hidden,
role in urban ecology, one overshadowed by its far more obvious place
at the heart of economic life. No animal, with the possible exception
of the mule (important only in the South), did more to serve the
transportation needs of urban areas.
In the early days of cities, horse-drawn buses (omnibuses) operated
on cobblestone streets at speeds hardly faster than a walking pace.
In the period just before the Civil War, however, the horse car
spread to cities across the nation. Faster and more efficient than
the older omnibuses, teams of horses hitched to passenger cars
transported people and goods up and down iron tracks. By 1890, more
than 32 million passengers climbed aboard New York City's horse car
lines.
The number of urban horses nearly doubled to a little under three
million over the course of the last third of the nineteenth century.
The adoption of the horse car contributed to the rise, as did the
expansion of railroad transportation. As trains shipped more goods
from point to point, horses were needed to haul the freight from
terminals to the ultimate destination.
The horses' importance to urban life was made amply apparent in 1872
when a fire scorched Boston's business district. Normally used to
pull fire equipment, the horses, struck down by a flulike disease,
were either dead or ill and thus unable to answer the call for help.
The fire charred over 700 buildings as a result. Equines in other
cities ultimately felt the effect of the outbreak (in Detroit,
delivery companies made do with hand carts), which killed somewhere
on the order of five percent of all the urban horses in the Northeast
and Canada.
Horses generated power for transportation (and manufacturing too),
but they also produced staggering amounts of manure, somewhere
between 15 and 30 pounds per animal every day. In Milwaukee, this
translated daily into 133 tons of horse droppings. In 1900, one
health officer in Rochester, New York (apparently with nothing better
to do), calculated that the city's 15,000 horses contributed enough
dung each year to completely cover an acre to a height of 175 feet.
Worse still, the stinking piles bred countless numbers of flies,
which harbored disease, including typhoid fever. Then there was the
dust to contend with. Horse turds dried up in the heat, only to be
pulverized by the creatures themselves as their hoofs made contact
with the pavement. Ground horse excrement was the nineteenth-century
equivalent of auto pollution-and was just as irritating to people's
respiratory systems.
The problems created by horse dung would have been even worse were it
not for an ingenious ecological move on the part of farmers living on
the outskirts of cities. They purchased the horse manure and used it
to fertilize their hay and vegetable crops. The hay then went to feed
the urban horse population and the vegetables to enhance the dinner
tables of the city's better-off residents. As a truck farmer from New
Jersey explained: "In our large commercial and manufacturing cities
where wealth has concentrated, and where abound families who live
regardless of expenditures, fabulous prices are freely paid for
vegetables and fruits to please the palate or adorn the table." By
the mid-nineteenth century, a reciprocal system, with manure passing
one way and vegetables and hay the other, had grown up in New York,
Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston.
New Yorkers perfected the system. The opening of the Erie Canal in
1825 propelled the city's rise to commercial dominance and spurred
farmers near the waterway to give up grain production in favor of
potatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, onions, and sweet corn, all of which
commanded good prices in the city's market. In 1879, Brooklyn and
Queens, New York, now the very essence of urbanity, even led the
nation in market gardening. Brooklyn was described by one source as
an "immense garden" serving the "vast and increasing demand of the
city of New York for vegetables and fruits of a perishable nature."
The soil in Brooklyn and Queens is shallow, limiting the ability of
roots to spread, and is not particularly adapted to storing moisture.
Normally a farmer would need to keep plenty of hay on hand to feed
the livestock that produced the soil-fortifying manure. But with
Manhattan dairies and stables located nearby, it made economic sense
for farmers to sell their hay and purchase horse manure in return.
Manure from all over the New York City area formed the ecological
lifeblood of Brooklyn and Queens farming. Brooklynites, one newspaper
noted, "are, no doubt, glad to get rid of their filth (and the Board
of Health will compel them to do so) [but] our farmers are glad to
obtain means with which to enrich their lands, and to pay a fair
price for such materials." Horse manure was so critical to farming
that one King's County landowner even made a provision in his will
that his son receive "all manure on the farm at the time of my
decease."
This ingenious early effort at recycling, however, proved
short-lived. By the end of the nineteenth century, improvements in
refrigeration and railroad transportation allowed farms in the South
and California to outcompete Brooklyn and Queens for New York City's
booming vegetable and fruit trade. Meanwhile, in the late 1880s, the
advent of electrified streetcars drove the horse and its manure out
of cities all across the nation. In 1912, a traffic count revealed,
for the first time, more cars than horses in New York. By the
following year, so little evidence remained of the manure-based truck
farms that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden found itself weighing the
educational potential of putting vegetables on exhibit. It was the
museum's sense that "innumerable children and young people . . . have
never seen . . . beans and peas growing on the plants that produce
them." Vegetables and horse manure now joined pigs on distant farms,
further reinforcing the division between urban and rural life and
contributing to the illusion of the city as somehow existing outside
of nature.Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
