Eat the City(31)
It was part of a cultural shift, the return of old-fashioned, unprocessed, richly flavored foods—as opposed to low-fat, chemically enhanced, supposedly healthful ones. The trend also seemed to reflect a desire to discover more moral ways of being a carnivore, by rejecting the industrial meat pumped full of antibiotics and hormones and produced on feedlots, in favor of animals raised carefully on small farms.
It looked like a moment to remember that New York has long been an enthusiastically carnivorous city.
IN 1818, when keeping swine in the street was standard, New York’s mayor had a butcher indicted for the practice. A few years later, when officials began rounding up pigs, crowds of hundreds of women freed the animals. Hog riots broke out in 1825, 1826, 1830, and 1832, all with the same resolution: the women saved their bacon. Despite officials’ best efforts, by 1842, roughly 10,000 stray pigs wandered city streets, and before a decade had passed, the number had doubled.
Snorting and squealing, copulating and defecating, the pigs offended the leaders of the bustling new metropolis, as historians have noted: “Our wives and daughters cannot walk abroad through the streets of the city without encountering the most disgusting spectacles of these animals indulging the propensities of nature,” declared the mayor in 1818.
Even Charles Dickens, that expert on urban squalor, remarked on the pigs he encountered on Broadway, New York’s most glamorous avenue. “Here is a solitary swine, lounging homeward by himself,” he wrote. “He has only one ear, having parted with the other to vagrant-dogs in the course of his city rambles. But he gets on very well without it; and leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life … turning up the news and small-talk of the city in the shape of cabbage-stalks and offal.”
“Sometimes, indeed,” the English writer continued, “you may see his small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcase garnishes a butcher’s door-post, but he grunts out ‘Such is life: all flesh is pork!’ buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles down the gutter: comforting himself with the reflection that there is one snout the less to anticipate stray cabbage-stalks, at any rate.”
Finally an armed squad stepped in to subdue the swine. A team of health wardens, policemen, scavengers, meat and street inspectors, and night and dock watchmen, carrying pistols, clubs, daggers, pickaxes, and crowbars, waged war on pigs in the summer of 1859. In the battlefields of Hog Town, the West Side district between Fiftieth and Fifty-Eighth streets known for its shanties and pig pens, police turned up hogs under beds and behind stairs, in cellars and garrets. They eventually drove some 20,000 swine north to the upper reaches of Manhattan. By the 1860s, no living pig was welcome below Eighty-Sixth Street. Those who hoped to remake New York as a nonanimal kingdom turned their attentions to other species.
Cows suffered their own dismal fate. As Manhattan’s pastures turned into buildings in the 1820s, they had lost grazing grounds. The unfortunate solution was to set up dairies adjacent to distilleries so cattle could nourish themselves on the hot slop—the by-product of making liquor—pouring out of the stills. Two thousand cows survived on this diet at Johnson & Sons, a distillery between Fifteenth and Sixteenth streets on the West Side, where the slop traveled to the animal pens in a tunnel under Tenth Avenue.
The system produced ulcerous, ailing cows whose milk—perhaps three-quarters of the city’s supply—often sickened those who drank it. When the cows stopped producing milk, they were slaughtered and sold as meat. This beef had unusual qualities, observers noted. It reeked, and had to be sold quickly or it would “putrefy on the dealer’s hands,” wrote an incensed reformer, Robert Hartley, who added that the meat was so bloated that cooking it would cause it to “shrivel up to the bone, or be reduced, perhaps, to one half its original dimensions.” The move to pasteurize milk came as a reaction to the products of these diseased cows, but the poor continued to consume their cheap meat.
Healthier cattle also walked to the city from distant farms. The drovers were thought to be scoundrels, classic middlemen moving between city and country, telling a thousand lies as they haggled and teased the farmer out of his beef and the butcher out of his cash. At farmhouses and drovers’ taverns with names like the Bull’s Head and the Drovers’ Holm, men and beasts would be liquored and fed, watered and grazed, according to their respective needs. Swimming their animals across streams and sleeping with them under the stars, drovers moved 200,000 head of cattle on the hoof each year as late as 1825—escorted by a menagerie of pigs, horses, and lambs from the Bronx down through Manhattan.
Yet whenever a maddened bull escaped from a cattle drive to gore bystanders, someone suggested that drovers should be restricted to nighttime marches. Whenever a new round of cholera or yellow fever broke out, people remarked that maybe slaughterhouses should be moved out of residential neighborhoods. In 1866, the city empowered a new Metropolitan Board of Health, the country’s first permanent public health agency, and one of its early orders of business was to regulate meat. The board quickly imposed strict new rules on butchers, stopped animals from ranging free, and banished slaughterhouses to a few blocks around Fortieth Street on the East and West sides. Portending the future, enormous modern slaughterhouses opened up across the Hudson in Bergen, New Jersey.
The status of the city’s butchers was changing. Once, they had been masters of life and death at the top of the food chain, the bosses of the markets. The last of the wild land had passed through their hands, as they broke down such increasingly rare creatures as buffalo, white hares, bears, deer, moose (the snout was a delicacy), otters, swans, and grouse. They had marched in civic parades, proudly bearing signs that read, “We Preserve by Destroying,” and “To all we divide a part.” But when the butchers launched a lawsuit against the slaughterhouse restrictions, they lost.