Who Remembers New York at This State?

New York City known as ‘The Capital of the World’, “The HQ of Capitalism”, but most importantly, the city people come to hoping to pursue the American Dream.

In BBC’s video, titled Filthy Cities, shows many issues of the industrial city of New York in the late 19th and early 20th century went through to become one of the most popular cities in the world. Disease, filth, and poverty plagued the streets of New York during this time period. Millions of immigrants, that fled to North America to escape their previous lives and start new ones, found that it was the opposite of what they thought New York was about.

In this documentary, commentator, Dan Snow, gives us a first hand experience of what the conditions were like for middle and poor class residents.

New York , being the bridge between Europe and North America, was within reach of the Atlantic trade. Millions of immigrants migrated here for the possibility of a new start, hoping to obtain the American Dream. This migration outburst created intolerable living circumstances, and the outcomes were deadly. In a place called ‘5 points’, named after a popular intersection, immigrants were crammed into tall buildings known as slums. These slums were placed almost right next to each other. There was barely any space between them. On top of that, about ten to fourteen people were forced to live in a single apartment where as us, in this day and age, could not even fit four people. Sometimes, these people had to run their business in their own apartment.

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They would even set up workstations there. With hardly any ventilation and absolutely no sewer, garbage piled into the streets.

In the winter, as Snow said, almost a meter deep of human and animal waste froze on the street and remained there until warm weather melted them. The greedy landlords saw the opportunity of high demand of slums, and raised the rent which furthermore worsened conditions. The tenants were overrun with bed bugs, body lice, and cockroaches. These insects infected the wounds they made on the defenseless immigrants and there was nothing they could do. With the abundance of debris and filth came the diseases typhus and cholera, which affected almost all of the city. Even bodies started piling up onto the streets. In 1832, a young doctor named Steven Smith was outraged by these conditions of the slums. After tracking down tax informations of the landlords for the slums, he was able to locate them, and demanded change to their regulations. When they refused, Smith then created a campaign against these corrupt men. But soon after, he found that even the New York City courthouse was just as corrupt, and laws would not be as easy to amend as he had hoped.

So what happened next, what did New York finally do to improve its conditions? In 1865, a Citizens Association report stated a fresh outbreak of cholera was on it’s way from Europe. The letter stated thev city should implement sanitation systems similar to those in London to prevent another outbreak of the disease. Authorities were forced to recognize the issue for the first time, and were frightened into creating the Board of Health. The Board of Health, with the help of Steven Smith, ordered an army of city cleaners into the slums to try and clean up conditions. They found 38,000 carts of human excrement, hundreds of dead horses, and thousands of dead cats lining the streets. The clean up reduced death rates proving there was indeed a connection between filth and disease, creating an awareness for New Yorkers. Another issue was the standard in which meat was distributed. In order to prevent loss of profit from rotten meat, meat companies would use Borax (used as a floor cleaner today), clothing dye, and grinding into sausage links to mask the rotten product.

Still rotten, it would once again create illness. ‘The Jungle,’ a book written by Upton Sinclair, opened the eyes of it’s readers exposing them to the unsanitary meat conditions. This book changed the regulations and quality of meat companies. Medical science also revolutionized the clean up of New York. The correlation of microorganisms and disease created awareness and improved medicine. Documenting actual slum conditions by a man named Jacob Reave through photography gave the slums a face, and also created awareness to the national public igniting change. Industrialization through the invention of the light bulb, street cars, railroads, power houses, and telegraphs named New York the heart of internal trade which increased wealth and population. All these factors once implemented drastically cleaned up the streets of New York. I found this documentary to be shocking.

Dan Snow through a series of images, reenactments, and visitations of historic places in New York embodied the agony and struggles of these people. He used realistic examples and did not over exaggerate the information and events that took place. The conditions of these people were unrealistic, and the allowance of it to occur baffles myself and historians. I think the policies revolutionists tried to implement were only somewhat effective. Completely cleaning up the city was nearly impossible with all the corruption in courthouses and favoritism of the wealthy. It seems the most effective method was industrialization and knowledge of microorganisms in medical science. The connection of disease to germs and unsanitary environments made way for permanent change within the city. In conclusion, watching this documentary put into perspective the hardships and reality of the expansion of New York. Industrialization up until this point by me has been viewed negatively, but after seeing the positive outcome has shifted my opinion on the Industrialization period.