A Sea Of Manure

School of Humans doab Booby. Oh don't you love this song Morning by Greeg. Doesn't this little ditty just soothe your soul? I like to imagine when I hear this song, that I'm frolicking through a field.

Perhaps even riding a horse.

I've never ridden a horse before, but I can see us galloping through a field.

And it's not hurting my vagina one bit.

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, I'd say a street in New York City. They're everywhere you can't escape. Oh God, I don't think I like horses anymore so. At the end of the nineteenth century, horses were one of the biggest problems in metropolitan areas all over the world.

That's right. I don't have a body. I'm just a disembodied voice.

And the thing is the pee and the pooh. Mostly the pooh builds up. It's estimated that one individual war horse would expel somewhere between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure a day, so in total, that's like three to four 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 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?

Well, let's stop.

Horsing around and get into it. Cue the theme song, This is American Filth Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history. This week's episode a sea of manure. So yeah, New York. 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

The peo would just get caked.

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 house because of fires and shit. 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.

And the thing is, every time that New.

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 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

But some of the people who already lived.

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. The city was their brunch buffet. In fact, there were actually so many pigs, like there's twenty thousand pigs was running around that they became part

Wow piggy courtship.

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.

Rid of them.

They're like, oh, pigs, they attack children, they pooh on you, They cause carriage accidents because they don't obey the traffic rules.

They're in the way. They also accused.

Pigs of carrying diseases, which they didn't really like. If any rich person in New York would get a headache, they'd.

Be like, oh, it's because of the pigs. The pigs did this to be.

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.

That's right.

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, 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,

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 might be even more disturbing than the fact that there was trash whether there was horse manure.

Another big issue that they had was.

That 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, 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

They were literally worked to death.

I would at this point make a beating a dead horse joke, but that feels very inappropriate and a viable reason for cancelation.

So let's move on.

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 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 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.

Yawnkes.

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.

A little bit corrupt. You know, there was fraud.

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 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.

He called on George E. Waring Junior.

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, and one of the men at the forefront was George E. Waring Junior, so Hoopsta's George. George was the son of a wealthy stove manufacturer, born in Palmdbridge, New York, and

This was the perfection of a horse's.

Head, small bony and of perfect shape, with keen, deer like eyes and thin, active ears. Her royal blood shone out 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,

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. 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 just restored to me. He was basically like, I don't care if

Yet meanwhile he's literally at war.

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 turned to look back at poor Vixen, and she gave me a little nay a farewell. He talked with the officer about all the good days he had had with

Find a way to make money off of our trash. HM very idealistic.

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. People were like, Wow, this guy is bold. You know, he's like in the papers writing about the Privy that's very impolite, but also very interesting. So he was becoming a 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 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, and there was other various strangage issues. 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.

It was put in place, there were no more epidemics.

So in eighteen ninety five, William Lafayette Strong became the mayor of New York City. 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

He was like, George, help us.

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. He hired a 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.

Was a big problem. And he did this for a variety of reasons. You know.

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 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, 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

The New York Times reported, clean streets.

At last, marvels have been done. There was a parade for the sanitation workers, who were called 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.

He was like, I'm making a parade for myself.

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 was eighteen ninety eight, the year of the Spanish American War,

A lot of people were sad.

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 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

It took the rise of automobiles.

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.

Nothing is wrong.

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 Field is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was written and hosted by me Gabby Watts.

Okay, guys, Bye School of Humans.