Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash Read Online Free PDF Page A

could handle. By the 1800s, the filth in lower Manhattan had accumulated to a depth of two to three feet in the wintertime, when household waste and horse manure combined with snow. My brownstone in Park Slope, like others built in the late 1800s, has a stoop leading to the second floor, which let residents clamber above the mess (though it still seeped into the ground floor during storms and when snow melted). For much of the nineteenth century, trash removal was a private, not municipal, service, which made garbage an issue of social class. I don’t know who lived in my building a hundred and twenty-odd years ago, but it’s likely they paid someone to take their ashes and food scraps away, to be dumped with other wastes into the Atlantic Ocean.
    Periodically, but usually spurred by outbreaks of disease, city officials made concerted efforts to clean the streets. It wasn’t a simple matter. Even when Manhattan’s population was less than a million, in the mid-nineteenth century, city horses dumped 500,000 pounds of manure a day on its streets, in addition to 45,000 gallons of urine. These were hardworking beasts, and their average life span was just two and a half years. In 1880, according to historians, 15,000 dead horses had to be cleared from city streets. A single carter couldn’t lift a horse, so the carcasses often lay around until scavengers and the elements reduced their mass. At this point they were unceremoniously tipped into the river, along with household refuse, or sold to “reduction plants” on Barren Island, out in Jamaica Bay, where they were steamed and compressed to produce grease, fertilizer, glue, and other unguinous by-products.
    In 1895, a reform mayor ousted Tammany Hall, Manhattan’s popular Democratic political machine, and appointed a crusading new commissioner of street cleaning, Colonel George E. Waring Jr. Working under the auspices of the Health Department, Waring put an end to sporadic cleanup efforts, instituted regular trash pickups, and required New Yorkers to separate their garbage into three curbside bins for fuel ash, dry rubbish, and “putrescible” waste (this quaint label for the wet stuff is still used by the Department of Sanitation today, though it now refers to anything that’s headed for the dump).
    The putrescibles were barged to the reduction plants and the ash delivered to landfills. (Brooklyn’s was carted to Fishhooks McCarthy’s smoldering Corona ash dump, in Queens, which became the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes, “a fantastic farm, where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” The ash dump closed in 1933; six years later, the World’s Fair rose on its site.) As it had been for many years, dry garbage, after being picked clean of valuable materials like rags and paper, was used to fill waterways and wetlands, creating tens of thousands of acres of valuable waterfront real estate, including most of lower Manhattan, the Red Hook shoreline of Brooklyn, and almost the entire northern and southern fringes of both Kings and Queens Counties, upon which our airports were built.
    New Yorkers in 1895 were just as balky about separating garbage as New Yorkers are today, and Colonel Waring’s diversion rate (that is, the amount of stuff he kept out of landfills) was not high. In 1898, Tammany Hall recaptured the mayor’s office, ended the recycling program, and resumed ocean dumping. The garbage killed oyster beds and it interfered with shipping. When waterfront-property owners complained about animal carcasses and rags on their beaches, the city once again dialed back ocean dumping (though it wasn’t banned by the federal government until 1934), and a single stream of unsorted garbage flowed to eighty-nine open dumps scattered around the boroughs.
    By the forties, public tolerance for the accumulating filth and vermin reached a tipping point. The city responded by closing its festering mounds and opening incinerators.