January 1, 2025 • 28 mins
Happy New Year, Filth Heads!
American Filth host Gabbie Watts (aka the person typing this) is moving to New York City in 2025 and looking forward to all the good smells.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Do Baby Booby, Oh, don't you love this song Morning
by Greeg.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Doesn't this little ditty just soothe your soul?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I like to imagine when I hear this song, that
I'm frolicking through a field.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Perhaps even riding a horse.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I've never ridden a horse before, but I can see
us galloping through a field and it's.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Not hurting my vagina one bit.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Horses, aren't they lovely, majestic, beautiful creatures. But wait, imagine
one horse. Then imagine another horse, and then another, and
then another, and then there are so many horses. They're
all crammed together on a busy street, say a street
(01:06):
in New York City. They're everywhere. You can't escape.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Oh God, I don't think I like horses anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
So. At the end of the nineteenth century, horses were
one of the biggest problems in metropolitan areas.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
All over the world. They were all over the place.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
They were used for all sorts of things like transportation.
Horses powered the trolley system. They were the locomotive engine
for carriages and buggies.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
And these buggies could be dangerous.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Two hundred New Yorkers got run over by carriages every year.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, those horses were drunk, but most of.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
The horses were used for hauling goods and building buildings.
And no, they wouldn't build with their little hoofs. They
were used to power the machineanery that would build the buildings,
you know, literal horse power. And the reason there are
so many horses is because there was so many people
(02:19):
in New York City. In eighteen hundred, there were like
thirty thousand people, but then by eighteen ninety there's like
two point six million, and it wasn't built to hold
that many. Luckily, very few people live there today. And
then there's like two hundred thousand horses. That's like one
(02:41):
horse per ten people. And do you guys know what
horses do? Unlike me, they poo and they pee.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
That's right. I don't have a body. I'm just a
disembodied voice.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
And the thing is the pee and the pooh. Mostly
the pooh builds up. It's estimated that one individual war
would expel somewhere between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure
a day, So in total, that's like three to four
(03:15):
million pounds a day from all the horses just in
the streets of New York and Let's also not forget
how each horse would also expel courts and quarts of piss.
And if you can believe it, all this horse he
(03:38):
dung was a problem. No one wanted to be clomping
upon miles of horse excrement. And so that's what we're
talking about in today's episode. How did they solve this
horseshit problem?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Well, let's stop.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Horsing around and get into it. Cue the theme song.
This is American philth I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I
tell you a filthy story from American history.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
This week's episode a sea of manure. So yeah, New York.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Lots of cities at the end of the nineteenth century
were covered in horse dookie. One person in the late
nineteenth century called New York a sea of manure. The
shit was quote lining city streets like banks of snow.
And the thing is, even when it snowed or when
it rained, that didn't help the problem at all.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
The peo would just get caked.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Into the sidewalk, into the streets, into the buildings, and
the horse shit. That's not the only problem. There's also
a lot of trash and garbage. People were producing a
lot of ash in their houses because of fires and shit.
(05:10):
But there wasn't a functional public garbage collection service. Like
if you wanted your street to be cleaned up, you
personally had to pay someone to do it or just
do it yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
And the thing is, every time that New.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
York City did hire people to clean they never seemed
to do their jobs. The garbage collectors and street cleaners
had a really bad reputation, you know, as lazy and
as slackers, and then they would only work if they
were bribed. The thing that's interesting, though, is that New
York City used to actually have great trash collection. This
(05:48):
was earlier in the nineteenth century because then they didn't
have that many horses, but they did have a lot
of pigs, that's right. It used to be that pigs
were just running them up throughout the town. And you
know what pigs like to do. They liked to eat
trash and then for dessert, they liked to eat their
(06:10):
own shit. Perfect sustainable. So the reason there are these
pigs in the city was that, like in the eighteen twenties,
a lot of people started moving to New York in
part because of the Erie Canal opening up.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
But some of the people who already lived.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
In New York City before this great influx of people.
They were homesteaders and these were their pigs. And so
the city was being built up, and the pigs were
just there, just free roman doing whatever they wanted to do,
which was mostly eat trash.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
The city was their brunch buffet.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
In fact, there were actually so many pigs, like there's
twenty thousand pigs was running around that they became part
of New York's early identity. Like travelers would come from
all over and they always had something to say about
the pigs. Like Charles Dickens, he came to New York
City in eighteen forty two. He wasn't really a big
fan of Americans, and so he was delighted when he
(07:07):
saw that America's big city was littered with swine. He wrote,
two portly sALS are trotting up behind a carriage, and
a select party of a half a dozen gentlemen hogs
have just now turned the corner.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Wow, piggy courtship.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
But the politicians and the rich people in the city
didn't like that pigs were associated with New York. They
didn't want visitors to keep thinking that their city was
no better than a barnyard. So they launched a smear
campaign against the pigs through the eighteen fifties and sixties
so that they could get.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Rid of them.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
They're like, oh, pigs, they attack children, they pooh on you,
They cause carriage accidents because they don't obey the traffic rules.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
They're in the way. They also accused.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Pigs of carrying diseases, which they didn't really like. If
any rich person in New York would get a headache, they'd.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Be like, Oh, it's because of the pigs. The pigs
did this to be.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And then they said the biggest sin of all that
the swine had been committing. Sometimes ladies, that's right, ladies
would see swine copulating in public view.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
That's something ladies should not be seeing. And so they
got rid of the pigs. And by getting rid of
the pigs, they actually gave themselves a much bigger problem
because the horse shit, unlike the pigs, the horse shit
actually does lead to disease because what comes with shit mosquitoes, bugs, rats,
(08:45):
other vermin that transmit disease. So New York City they
had all the hits. They had cholera, they had typhoid,
they had typhus, they had yellow fever, malaria. Adults were sick,
children were dying death indirectly by dung. So yeah, a
lot was at stake. So we're at this point in
time where people are seriously considering how to improve sanitation,
(09:12):
and city officials, you know, they tried to do some
things about it. One plan that worked briefly was that
the city had farmers come in and take as much
of the manure as they could because they're like, hey,
you could use it as fertilizer, and wow, look at
this symbiotic relationship. You provide the labor to remove the dung,
(09:35):
and whilah, free fertilizer. But the thing is there was
just too much poo and the farmers didn't need that
much fertilizer. They realized that they were at the end
of a bad deal, so they're like, hey, we'll remove
the manure as long as you pay us. Damn, the
city couldn't get free labor boo. And the thing that
(09:58):
might be even more disturbing than the fact that there
was trash, whether the it was horse manure.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Another big issue that they had was that.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Sometimes people would just leave their horses in the street
after they died, that's right. They would just leave their
dead horses in the street to rot. Don't we love
to hear that? And now, horse gurlies, you might want
to tune out for the next couple of minutes because
I'm going to talk about the horses and you're not
going to like what I'm gonna say. Because the horses,
(10:30):
they were not treated well. Most of them were being
used for horse power, so they were worked to the brink.
They also lived in terrible conditions. The horses were stabled
in these big garages within New York's horse districts. They
were just crowded in there, and they were fed from
(10:52):
these large grainaries, which attracted rats and other rodents. And
the craziest thing is that the grain sometimes would rot,
and because of like fermentation and whatnot, sometimes the garages
would then explode. They were like burned down, and then
all the buildings in the surrounding area would also burn down.
(11:13):
What that's crazy. So, yeah, the horses weren't having a
good time. The average lifespan of a horse is twenty
five to thirty years, but in the eighteen nineties, the
average lifespan of the workhorses was two and a half years.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
They were literally worked to death.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I would at this point make a beating a dead
horse joke, but that feels very inappropriate and a viable
reason for cancelation.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So let's move on.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
One thing city officials did with these dead horses, starting
in the eighteen fifties was send them to this little island,
Barren Island, off near Jamaica Bay. Because this island had
several processing mills. That's right, they would turn the dead
horses into glue. And that's how it got the name
(12:03):
dead Horse Bay. And you might be thinking, an island
filled with glue factories. That sounds terrible. And what's worse,
people actually lived on the island. Yeah, all the people
who operated the glue factories and whatnot they lived there.
Most of the residents were immigrants, and they lived in
(12:24):
very toxic conditions. And then even off the island they
were treated appallingly. Like in eighteen seventy nine, there was
this Brooklyn Railroad company that got the court to rule
that they could legally turn away the people who lived
on the island because their clothes smelled so bad. Yakes,
(12:47):
but even dead Horse Bay couldn't save New York City.
There are still a lot of dead horses and even
more horse shit. And yet the city's politicians had done
some things here and there trying to relieve the problem
of filth. But the problem was the administration in the
early eighteen nineties was.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
A little bit corrupt. You know, there was fraud.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
There's this organization, just greedy men doing greedy men stuff.
And part of the reason they didn't have an effective
sanitation department was because some of them were pocketing the
money that was supposed to be for cleaning up the city. Whoopsies.
But it was getting bad. There's so many people, so
(13:31):
much worseshit. Everyone was like, something's got to change. People
are sick and it smells. So there was an election
and a new mayor, and this mayor was very much
into reform, and he knew who he needed to get
to make everything change in the sanitation department.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
He called on George E. Waring Junior.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
God, what a cliffhanger be right back after these soothing advertisements.
So while the politicians in New York were not investing
in their sanitation department aka taking away the money for
the sanitation department, around the country and around the world,
there had been some innovation in sanitary tech sandy tech,
(14:26):
and one of the men at the forefront was George E.
Waring Junior, so Hoopsta's George.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
George was the.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Son of a wealthy stove manufacturer, born in Palmdbridge, New York,
and when he was younger, George studied agriculture science. He
was a farmer basically, but then in eighteen fifty seven
he joined a very big project in New York City.
He was going to help with draining the wetlands so
they could construct Central Park. He was like, yes, I
(15:00):
will be an agricultural and drainage engineer now. And also
what we need to know about George is that he
loved horses. And I know I was talking about all
sorts of nasty things related to horses, so I thought
we might have a nice tangent talking about how much
this guy loved horses. And no, I don't mean he
(15:23):
loved horses in like a brony or a furry sort
of way. Nothing nasty, just a pure tender love for
a horse. Don't be nasty. He loved horses so much
that in eighteen seventy five he published a book about
all of his horses and the adventures that they had
had together called Whip and Spur, and it seems the
(15:48):
horse he loved the most was his beloved Mayor Vixen.
Vixen came into his life when he was working on
the drainage system in Central Park. He realized to do
his job that he needed a saddle horse to transport
him around and do his duties. He went to various auctions,
(16:09):
tracked down leads, but couldn't find a horse. It wasn't
until a stable boy was like, hey, sir, I got
a man who can get you a horse. And so
George walked to the edge of town and met a
dude who peddled not just clams but also potatoes. Wow,
diversified inventory. And that dude was like, yeah, I got
a horse you can have. So they went to the
(16:32):
barn and that's where George met Vixen. She was scrawny
from all the hard labor she had done, but he
knew he wanted this horse because of her quote wonderful head.
This was the perfection of a horse's head, small bony
and of perfect shape, with keen, deer like eyes and thin,
(16:53):
active ears.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Her royal blood shone out.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
From her face. And kept it beautiful. End quote and
George and Vixen, they had a great time together. He
helped him go about his duties, and then sometimes they
would have some fun while working on the drainage system.
He wrote, the park afforded good leaping in those days.
Some of the fences were still standing around the abandoned gardens,
(17:19):
and new ditches and old brooks were plenty. She cleared
the brook with apparent ease, and once, in a moment
of excitement, she carried me over a brook with a
clear leap of twenty six feet. Jeorge really loved Vixen.
She was a great companion, whether he was riding her
(17:40):
or they were just walking next to each other. He
said she was as good company as a dog, better,
perhaps because she seemed more really a part of one's self.
Vixen followed George into the Civil War, but unfortunately that's
when she died. In his book, he spent many pages
(18:03):
describing how he tried to save her, how he tried
to keep her alive. At one point, she had gotten
a fever, and he asked the veterinarian to stay back
and heal her. He said the thought of leaving her
was very bitter, and with the work of the vet
she did recover and was returned to George at their camp.
(18:23):
George said there was now hope that she would recover
sufficiently to be sent to Saint Louis to be nursed.
But then that night another horse broke into her enclosure
and broke her leg. George was beside himself. He said,
I could not let her die now, when she was
(18:43):
just restored to me.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
He was basically like, I don't care if her leg
is broken.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
He knew that she could never carry him again, but
he was like, she could be my pet, and I
could send her home and make her happy for many
a long year.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yet meanwhile he's literally at war.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
But eventually, on a lovely Sunday morning in November eighteen
sixty two, he saw Vixen sitting on her haunches like
a dog, and she sat like that all day and
refused any food, and George finally knew there was no hope.
She wasn't going to get better. So one of the
officers led him to his tent, and George said, I
(19:23):
turned to look back at poor Vixen, and she gave
me a little.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Nay, a farewell.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
He talked with the officer about all the good days
he had had with Vixen until they heard a single shot.
That evening, the band played a funeral song, and George said,
the sun went down on one of the very sad
days of my life. But anyway, enough of that horse story.
(19:52):
After the war, George continued to work at the intersection
of farming and engineering. He wrote a bunch of books
about scientific agriculture along with his stories about horses, and
he got a lot of good money for this. Went
to Europe or he wrote traveling stories and probably learned
about what European engineers were doing to help their cities.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Not fall to trash and rot. And along the.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Way he developed a deep interest in public health. He
wrote a bunch of stuff about sanitation. He would make
the case that things need to be more sanitary because
it's right for the public's health. But also he was like,
if we invest in sanitation, maybe we can.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Find a way to make money off of our trash.
HM very idealistic.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Now a lot of people think that George wasn't actually
that innovative. What he was good at was taking other
people's ideas and making them seem really compelling. He had
a big personality and wrote with quote infinite gusto.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
People were like, Wow, this guy is bold. You know,
he's like in the.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Papers writing about the Privy that's very impolite, but also
very interesting.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
So he was becoming a.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Bit of a celebrity and also a hot shot in
the sanitary engineering world. So in eighteen seventy eight, George
was the person that the newly established National Board of
Health called on to go fix Memphis. What was happening
in Memphis was they kept having these cholera and yellow
(21:28):
fever epidemics, and a big part of the reason the
diseases were so bad there was because a lot of
their water wells were right next to the places where
they shat and pissed.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
And there was other various strange issues.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
So they called on George to fix it, and he
came up with a whole new sewer system for the
city that would separate all the bad stuff from the water,
and after.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
It was put in place, there were no more epidemics.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
So in eighteen ninety five, William Lafayette Strong became the
mayor of.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
New York City.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Strong was big on reform, and he came into office
looking to squash the corruption of the previous administration. One
newspaper wrote that Strong's election was a revolution that closes
a dark and opens a bright era in the municipal
affairs of New York And so almost immediately after he
(22:24):
took office on January first, eighteen ninety five, William Strong
appointed George Waring as the Commissioner of street Cleaning for
New York City.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
He was like, George, help us.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
We're drowning and shit and trash and dead animal carcasses
the set. So George got to work. He wrote some memos.
He said, there is much need for radical improvement. And
one of the first things he did was a symbol
a sanitation army.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
He hired a.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Bunch of civically minded dudes to become street cleaners and
trash collectors. He made them dress in white suits, you know,
the perfect color when you're cleaning trash, shit, piss and
oh also, you know, ash.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Was a big problem. And he did this for a
variety of reasons. You know.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
One, the public was skeptical about street cleaners because, as
I said earlier, usually they were nefarious dudes who would
only work if they were bribed. But George was trying
to be like, no, look, these are professional men. Look
at their suits. And George's approach to cleaning was very systematic.
He was like, Okay, go clean this part of the
city from this exact block to this one at this
(23:34):
time with this equipment, and make sure it looks good
before you move on. And he told his men to
start cleaning in the poorer areas of the city because
the rich people would already hire people to clean their streets.
And initially the people who lived in the poorer areas
threw rocks at them because they saw a bunch of
dudes in matching suits, and they were like, what the hell,
they're trying to steal our homes. But eventually the residents realized, oh,
(23:57):
they're just cleaning the streets nice cool, and after two
weeks their streets looked just as clean as the peoples.
And this literal street cleaning wasn't the only thing George
Wearing was doing. Oh no, he made new and improved
street cleaning and garbage collecting equipment. He also came up
with this system where he was making residents separate the
(24:20):
things they were trying to throw away. He made them
separate them into four categories, and in a short period
of time George had really triumphed. The New York Times
reported clean streets at last, marvels have been done. There
was a parade for the sanitation workers, who were called
(24:42):
white wings or white angels. But to be clear, George
is actually the one who threw the parade. But whatever,
it wasn't like the people got together and we're like,
we're gonna have a parade.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
He was like, I'm making a parade for myself.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
But unfortunately, after the next election, that corrupt government from
before was voted back in. George was out of a job.
He was not invited back as Commissioner of street cleaning.
They didn't want someone appointed under reformist mayor Strong Gross
But George Waring was not done with his career. It
(25:22):
was eighteen ninety eight, the year of the Spanish American War,
you know, the one with the embalmed beef scandal. George
got a job to go down to Havana and make
an assessment about their sanitation so that they could figure
out how to stop all these yellow fever outbreaks. His
results were the sanitation is very bad, low score, there's
(25:45):
no sewers, trash and feces are just thrown to the streets.
The market smells very bad, and the privies are overflowing,
and the street cleaners they have no money. On his
way back, he wrote the first draft of his findings,
and he was like, yeah, if you give me ten
million dollars, I can fix it.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
By the day he got back to New York, he.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Started feeling a bit sick, and then four days later
he died of yellow fever.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
A lot of people were sad.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
One person wrote about his death quote, his death at
the hands of the King of dirt diseases gives a
mournful but most impressive emphasis to the lesson which he
taught so earnestly, of the kinship of dirt and disease.
George's sanitation plans were enacted in Havana, and Havanah was
(26:35):
cleaned up. People are like, damn, it looks good, but
unfortunately there's still a lot of yellow fever. And New York, well,
it was cleaner than it had ever been in the
nineteenth century. But you know, the horseship problem did not
fully resolve. It was still around. There's still a lot
of horses. It was still a little gross, just maybe
(26:58):
less but still kind of gross. And the new administration
wasn't really giving resources to the sanitation department, and technically
the poop problem wasn't actually fixed until.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
We started driving cars. It took the rise of automobiles.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
To really eliminate horseshit from the streets because they're like,
we don't need as many horses as we used to.
You know, that's how you solve your problem. Go to
this horse, just get rid of the horses. And yeah,
the time, technically cars were the cleaner, greener option, and
look how that's worked out perfectly.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Nothing is wrong.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So thank you Henry Ford for everything you did. Just kidding,
I don't want to thank Henry Ford, but you know,
cars anyway, Guys, I think every week we learn a
lesson from American Felt, and I think the lesson here
is that uh don't have two hundred thousand horses. American
(28:08):
Field is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast.
This episode was written and hosted by me Gabby Watts.
Our senior producer is Amelia Brock. Our executive producers are
Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr. If you guys
liked the show, please leave a five star review and
a comment, and you can also follow along with the
pod on Instagram at American Field Pod.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Okay, guys, Bye School of Humans.
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Do Baby Booby, Oh, don't you love this song Morning
by Greeg.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Doesn't this little ditty just soothe your soul?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I like to imagine when I hear this song, that
I'm frolicking through a field.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Perhaps even riding a horse.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I've never ridden a horse before, but I can see
us galloping through a field and it's.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Not hurting my vagina one bit.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Horses, aren't they lovely, majestic, beautiful creatures. But wait, imagine
one horse. Then imagine another horse, and then another, and
then another, and then there are so many horses. They're
all crammed together on a busy street, say a street
(01:06):
in New York City. They're everywhere. You can't escape.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Oh God, I don't think I like horses anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
So. At the end of the nineteenth century, horses were
one of the biggest problems in metropolitan areas.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
All over the world. They were all over the place.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
They were used for all sorts of things like transportation.
Horses powered the trolley system. They were the locomotive engine
for carriages and buggies.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
And these buggies could be dangerous.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Two hundred New Yorkers got run over by carriages every year.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, those horses were drunk, but most of.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
The horses were used for hauling goods and building buildings.
And no, they wouldn't build with their little hoofs. They
were used to power the machineanery that would build the buildings,
you know, literal horse power. And the reason there are
so many horses is because there was so many people
(02:19):
in New York City. In eighteen hundred, there were like
thirty thousand people, but then by eighteen ninety there's like
two point six million, and it wasn't built to hold
that many. Luckily, very few people live there today. And
then there's like two hundred thousand horses. That's like one
(02:41):
horse per ten people. And do you guys know what
horses do? Unlike me, they poo and they pee.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
That's right. I don't have a body. I'm just a
disembodied voice.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
And the thing is the pee and the pooh. Mostly
the pooh builds up. It's estimated that one individual war
would expel somewhere between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure
a day, So in total, that's like three to four
(03:15):
million pounds a day from all the horses just in
the streets of New York and Let's also not forget
how each horse would also expel courts and quarts of piss.
And if you can believe it, all this horse he
(03:38):
dung was a problem. No one wanted to be clomping
upon miles of horse excrement. And so that's what we're
talking about in today's episode. How did they solve this
horseshit problem?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Well, let's stop.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Horsing around and get into it. Cue the theme song.
This is American philth I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I
tell you a filthy story from American history.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
This week's episode a sea of manure. So yeah, New York.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Lots of cities at the end of the nineteenth century
were covered in horse dookie. One person in the late
nineteenth century called New York a sea of manure. The
shit was quote lining city streets like banks of snow.
And the thing is, even when it snowed or when
it rained, that didn't help the problem at all.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
The peo would just get caked.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Into the sidewalk, into the streets, into the buildings, and
the horse shit. That's not the only problem. There's also
a lot of trash and garbage. People were producing a
lot of ash in their houses because of fires and shit.
(05:10):
But there wasn't a functional public garbage collection service. Like
if you wanted your street to be cleaned up, you
personally had to pay someone to do it or just
do it yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
And the thing is, every time that New.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
York City did hire people to clean they never seemed
to do their jobs. The garbage collectors and street cleaners
had a really bad reputation, you know, as lazy and
as slackers, and then they would only work if they
were bribed. The thing that's interesting, though, is that New
York City used to actually have great trash collection. This
(05:48):
was earlier in the nineteenth century because then they didn't
have that many horses, but they did have a lot
of pigs, that's right. It used to be that pigs
were just running them up throughout the town. And you
know what pigs like to do. They liked to eat
trash and then for dessert, they liked to eat their
(06:10):
own shit. Perfect sustainable. So the reason there are these
pigs in the city was that, like in the eighteen twenties,
a lot of people started moving to New York in
part because of the Erie Canal opening up.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
But some of the people who already lived.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
In New York City before this great influx of people.
They were homesteaders and these were their pigs. And so
the city was being built up, and the pigs were
just there, just free roman doing whatever they wanted to do,
which was mostly eat trash.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
The city was their brunch buffet.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
In fact, there were actually so many pigs, like there's
twenty thousand pigs was running around that they became part
of New York's early identity. Like travelers would come from
all over and they always had something to say about
the pigs. Like Charles Dickens, he came to New York
City in eighteen forty two. He wasn't really a big
fan of Americans, and so he was delighted when he
(07:07):
saw that America's big city was littered with swine. He wrote,
two portly sALS are trotting up behind a carriage, and
a select party of a half a dozen gentlemen hogs
have just now turned the corner.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Wow, piggy courtship.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
But the politicians and the rich people in the city
didn't like that pigs were associated with New York. They
didn't want visitors to keep thinking that their city was
no better than a barnyard. So they launched a smear
campaign against the pigs through the eighteen fifties and sixties
so that they could get.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Rid of them.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
They're like, oh, pigs, they attack children, they pooh on you,
They cause carriage accidents because they don't obey the traffic rules.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
They're in the way. They also accused.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Pigs of carrying diseases, which they didn't really like. If
any rich person in New York would get a headache, they'd.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Be like, Oh, it's because of the pigs. The pigs
did this to be.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And then they said the biggest sin of all that
the swine had been committing. Sometimes ladies, that's right, ladies
would see swine copulating in public view.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
That's something ladies should not be seeing. And so they
got rid of the pigs. And by getting rid of
the pigs, they actually gave themselves a much bigger problem
because the horse shit, unlike the pigs, the horse shit
actually does lead to disease because what comes with shit mosquitoes, bugs, rats,
(08:45):
other vermin that transmit disease. So New York City they
had all the hits. They had cholera, they had typhoid,
they had typhus, they had yellow fever, malaria. Adults were sick,
children were dying death indirectly by dung. So yeah, a
lot was at stake. So we're at this point in
time where people are seriously considering how to improve sanitation,
(09:12):
and city officials, you know, they tried to do some
things about it. One plan that worked briefly was that
the city had farmers come in and take as much
of the manure as they could because they're like, hey,
you could use it as fertilizer, and wow, look at
this symbiotic relationship. You provide the labor to remove the dung,
(09:35):
and whilah, free fertilizer. But the thing is there was
just too much poo and the farmers didn't need that
much fertilizer. They realized that they were at the end
of a bad deal, so they're like, hey, we'll remove
the manure as long as you pay us. Damn, the
city couldn't get free labor boo. And the thing that
(09:58):
might be even more disturbing than the fact that there
was trash, whether the it was horse manure.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Another big issue that they had was that.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Sometimes people would just leave their horses in the street
after they died, that's right. They would just leave their
dead horses in the street to rot. Don't we love
to hear that? And now, horse gurlies, you might want
to tune out for the next couple of minutes because
I'm going to talk about the horses and you're not
going to like what I'm gonna say. Because the horses,
(10:30):
they were not treated well. Most of them were being
used for horse power, so they were worked to the brink.
They also lived in terrible conditions. The horses were stabled
in these big garages within New York's horse districts. They
were just crowded in there, and they were fed from
(10:52):
these large grainaries, which attracted rats and other rodents. And
the craziest thing is that the grain sometimes would rot,
and because of like fermentation and whatnot, sometimes the garages
would then explode. They were like burned down, and then
all the buildings in the surrounding area would also burn down.
(11:13):
What that's crazy. So, yeah, the horses weren't having a
good time. The average lifespan of a horse is twenty
five to thirty years, but in the eighteen nineties, the
average lifespan of the workhorses was two and a half years.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
They were literally worked to death.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I would at this point make a beating a dead
horse joke, but that feels very inappropriate and a viable
reason for cancelation.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So let's move on.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
One thing city officials did with these dead horses, starting
in the eighteen fifties was send them to this little island,
Barren Island, off near Jamaica Bay. Because this island had
several processing mills. That's right, they would turn the dead
horses into glue. And that's how it got the name
(12:03):
dead Horse Bay. And you might be thinking, an island
filled with glue factories. That sounds terrible. And what's worse,
people actually lived on the island. Yeah, all the people
who operated the glue factories and whatnot they lived there.
Most of the residents were immigrants, and they lived in
(12:24):
very toxic conditions. And then even off the island they
were treated appallingly. Like in eighteen seventy nine, there was
this Brooklyn Railroad company that got the court to rule
that they could legally turn away the people who lived
on the island because their clothes smelled so bad. Yakes,
(12:47):
but even dead Horse Bay couldn't save New York City.
There are still a lot of dead horses and even
more horse shit. And yet the city's politicians had done
some things here and there trying to relieve the problem
of filth. But the problem was the administration in the
early eighteen nineties was.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
A little bit corrupt. You know, there was fraud.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
There's this organization, just greedy men doing greedy men stuff.
And part of the reason they didn't have an effective
sanitation department was because some of them were pocketing the
money that was supposed to be for cleaning up the city. Whoopsies.
But it was getting bad. There's so many people, so
(13:31):
much worseshit. Everyone was like, something's got to change. People
are sick and it smells. So there was an election
and a new mayor, and this mayor was very much
into reform, and he knew who he needed to get
to make everything change in the sanitation department.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
He called on George E. Waring Junior.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
God, what a cliffhanger be right back after these soothing advertisements.
So while the politicians in New York were not investing
in their sanitation department aka taking away the money for
the sanitation department, around the country and around the world,
there had been some innovation in sanitary tech sandy tech,
(14:26):
and one of the men at the forefront was George E.
Waring Junior, so Hoopsta's George.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
George was the.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Son of a wealthy stove manufacturer, born in Palmdbridge, New York,
and when he was younger, George studied agriculture science. He
was a farmer basically, but then in eighteen fifty seven
he joined a very big project in New York City.
He was going to help with draining the wetlands so
they could construct Central Park. He was like, yes, I
(15:00):
will be an agricultural and drainage engineer now. And also
what we need to know about George is that he
loved horses. And I know I was talking about all
sorts of nasty things related to horses, so I thought
we might have a nice tangent talking about how much
this guy loved horses. And no, I don't mean he
(15:23):
loved horses in like a brony or a furry sort
of way. Nothing nasty, just a pure tender love for
a horse. Don't be nasty. He loved horses so much
that in eighteen seventy five he published a book about
all of his horses and the adventures that they had
had together called Whip and Spur, and it seems the
(15:48):
horse he loved the most was his beloved Mayor Vixen.
Vixen came into his life when he was working on
the drainage system in Central Park. He realized to do
his job that he needed a saddle horse to transport
him around and do his duties. He went to various auctions,
(16:09):
tracked down leads, but couldn't find a horse. It wasn't
until a stable boy was like, hey, sir, I got
a man who can get you a horse. And so
George walked to the edge of town and met a
dude who peddled not just clams but also potatoes. Wow,
diversified inventory. And that dude was like, yeah, I got
a horse you can have. So they went to the
(16:32):
barn and that's where George met Vixen. She was scrawny
from all the hard labor she had done, but he
knew he wanted this horse because of her quote wonderful head.
This was the perfection of a horse's head, small bony
and of perfect shape, with keen, deer like eyes and thin,
(16:53):
active ears.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Her royal blood shone out.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
From her face. And kept it beautiful. End quote and
George and Vixen, they had a great time together. He
helped him go about his duties, and then sometimes they
would have some fun while working on the drainage system.
He wrote, the park afforded good leaping in those days.
Some of the fences were still standing around the abandoned gardens,
(17:19):
and new ditches and old brooks were plenty. She cleared
the brook with apparent ease, and once, in a moment
of excitement, she carried me over a brook with a
clear leap of twenty six feet. Jeorge really loved Vixen.
She was a great companion, whether he was riding her
(17:40):
or they were just walking next to each other. He
said she was as good company as a dog, better,
perhaps because she seemed more really a part of one's self.
Vixen followed George into the Civil War, but unfortunately that's
when she died. In his book, he spent many pages
(18:03):
describing how he tried to save her, how he tried
to keep her alive. At one point, she had gotten
a fever, and he asked the veterinarian to stay back
and heal her. He said the thought of leaving her
was very bitter, and with the work of the vet
she did recover and was returned to George at their camp.
(18:23):
George said there was now hope that she would recover
sufficiently to be sent to Saint Louis to be nursed.
But then that night another horse broke into her enclosure
and broke her leg. George was beside himself. He said,
I could not let her die now, when she was
(18:43):
just restored to me.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
He was basically like, I don't care if her leg
is broken.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
He knew that she could never carry him again, but
he was like, she could be my pet, and I
could send her home and make her happy for many
a long year.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yet meanwhile he's literally at war.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
But eventually, on a lovely Sunday morning in November eighteen
sixty two, he saw Vixen sitting on her haunches like
a dog, and she sat like that all day and
refused any food, and George finally knew there was no hope.
She wasn't going to get better. So one of the
officers led him to his tent, and George said, I
(19:23):
turned to look back at poor Vixen, and she gave
me a little.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Nay, a farewell.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
He talked with the officer about all the good days
he had had with Vixen until they heard a single shot.
That evening, the band played a funeral song, and George said,
the sun went down on one of the very sad
days of my life. But anyway, enough of that horse story.
(19:52):
After the war, George continued to work at the intersection
of farming and engineering. He wrote a bunch of books
about scientific agriculture along with his stories about horses, and
he got a lot of good money for this. Went
to Europe or he wrote traveling stories and probably learned
about what European engineers were doing to help their cities.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Not fall to trash and rot. And along the.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Way he developed a deep interest in public health. He
wrote a bunch of stuff about sanitation. He would make
the case that things need to be more sanitary because
it's right for the public's health. But also he was like,
if we invest in sanitation, maybe we can.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Find a way to make money off of our trash.
HM very idealistic.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Now a lot of people think that George wasn't actually
that innovative. What he was good at was taking other
people's ideas and making them seem really compelling. He had
a big personality and wrote with quote infinite gusto.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
People were like, Wow, this guy is bold. You know,
he's like in the.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Papers writing about the Privy that's very impolite, but also
very interesting.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
So he was becoming a.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Bit of a celebrity and also a hot shot in
the sanitary engineering world. So in eighteen seventy eight, George
was the person that the newly established National Board of
Health called on to go fix Memphis. What was happening
in Memphis was they kept having these cholera and yellow
(21:28):
fever epidemics, and a big part of the reason the
diseases were so bad there was because a lot of
their water wells were right next to the places where
they shat and pissed.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
And there was other various strange issues.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
So they called on George to fix it, and he
came up with a whole new sewer system for the
city that would separate all the bad stuff from the water,
and after.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
It was put in place, there were no more epidemics.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
So in eighteen ninety five, William Lafayette Strong became the
mayor of.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
New York City.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Strong was big on reform, and he came into office
looking to squash the corruption of the previous administration. One
newspaper wrote that Strong's election was a revolution that closes
a dark and opens a bright era in the municipal
affairs of New York And so almost immediately after he
(22:24):
took office on January first, eighteen ninety five, William Strong
appointed George Waring as the Commissioner of street Cleaning for
New York City.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
He was like, George, help us.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
We're drowning and shit and trash and dead animal carcasses
the set. So George got to work. He wrote some memos.
He said, there is much need for radical improvement. And
one of the first things he did was a symbol
a sanitation army.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
He hired a.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Bunch of civically minded dudes to become street cleaners and
trash collectors. He made them dress in white suits, you know,
the perfect color when you're cleaning trash, shit, piss and
oh also, you know, ash.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Was a big problem. And he did this for a
variety of reasons. You know.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
One, the public was skeptical about street cleaners because, as
I said earlier, usually they were nefarious dudes who would
only work if they were bribed. But George was trying
to be like, no, look, these are professional men. Look
at their suits. And George's approach to cleaning was very systematic.
He was like, Okay, go clean this part of the
city from this exact block to this one at this
(23:34):
time with this equipment, and make sure it looks good
before you move on. And he told his men to
start cleaning in the poorer areas of the city because
the rich people would already hire people to clean their streets.
And initially the people who lived in the poorer areas
threw rocks at them because they saw a bunch of
dudes in matching suits, and they were like, what the hell,
they're trying to steal our homes. But eventually the residents realized, oh,
(23:57):
they're just cleaning the streets nice cool, and after two
weeks their streets looked just as clean as the peoples.
And this literal street cleaning wasn't the only thing George
Wearing was doing. Oh no, he made new and improved
street cleaning and garbage collecting equipment. He also came up
with this system where he was making residents separate the
(24:20):
things they were trying to throw away. He made them
separate them into four categories, and in a short period
of time George had really triumphed. The New York Times
reported clean streets at last, marvels have been done. There
was a parade for the sanitation workers, who were called
(24:42):
white wings or white angels. But to be clear, George
is actually the one who threw the parade. But whatever,
it wasn't like the people got together and we're like,
we're gonna have a parade.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
He was like, I'm making a parade for myself.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
But unfortunately, after the next election, that corrupt government from
before was voted back in. George was out of a job.
He was not invited back as Commissioner of street cleaning.
They didn't want someone appointed under reformist mayor Strong Gross
But George Waring was not done with his career. It
(25:22):
was eighteen ninety eight, the year of the Spanish American War,
you know, the one with the embalmed beef scandal. George
got a job to go down to Havana and make
an assessment about their sanitation so that they could figure
out how to stop all these yellow fever outbreaks. His
results were the sanitation is very bad, low score, there's
(25:45):
no sewers, trash and feces are just thrown to the streets.
The market smells very bad, and the privies are overflowing,
and the street cleaners they have no money. On his
way back, he wrote the first draft of his findings,
and he was like, yeah, if you give me ten
million dollars, I can fix it.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
By the day he got back to New York, he.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Started feeling a bit sick, and then four days later
he died of yellow fever.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
A lot of people were sad.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
One person wrote about his death quote, his death at
the hands of the King of dirt diseases gives a
mournful but most impressive emphasis to the lesson which he
taught so earnestly, of the kinship of dirt and disease.
George's sanitation plans were enacted in Havana, and Havanah was
(26:35):
cleaned up. People are like, damn, it looks good, but
unfortunately there's still a lot of yellow fever. And New York, well,
it was cleaner than it had ever been in the
nineteenth century. But you know, the horseship problem did not
fully resolve. It was still around. There's still a lot
of horses. It was still a little gross, just maybe
(26:58):
less but still kind of gross. And the new administration
wasn't really giving resources to the sanitation department, and technically
the poop problem wasn't actually fixed until.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
We started driving cars. It took the rise of automobiles.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
To really eliminate horseshit from the streets because they're like,
we don't need as many horses as we used to.
You know, that's how you solve your problem. Go to
this horse, just get rid of the horses. And yeah,
the time, technically cars were the cleaner, greener option, and
look how that's worked out perfectly.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Nothing is wrong.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So thank you Henry Ford for everything you did. Just kidding,
I don't want to thank Henry Ford, but you know,
cars anyway, Guys, I think every week we learn a
lesson from American Felt, and I think the lesson here
is that uh don't have two hundred thousand horses. American
(28:08):
Field is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast.
This episode was written and hosted by me Gabby Watts.
Our senior producer is Amelia Brock. Our executive producers are
Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr. If you guys
liked the show, please leave a five star review and
a comment, and you can also follow along with the
pod on Instagram at American Field Pod.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Okay, guys, Bye School of Humans.
Host
Gabbie Watts
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.