Eat the City(68)
“We have friends who were born here—they don’t like to leave the block,” says Michael. It’s something they never understood about New York: how its people could be so uninterested in the nature creeping in from all the edges of the city. “We’re not like that. We like to go outdoors,” Michael says. “We came from a country where everybody spends time outside. We love the openness.” He says he dreams of finding a girl to marry and buying a house someplace with wide-open vistas and good fishing.
And then he dives into the water, his running shoes thrashing at the surface as he does an awkward front crawl away from his net.
EARLY on, New York turned its back on its waters. Alongside the story of the city sustaining itself by the water is a story of the city trashing it. The Dutch built deep canals to connect the middle of Manhattan to the rivers, then dumped their garbage in them. Europeans girdled the island with bulkheads and studded it with piers, destroying wetland fish habitats and natural sandy beaches. Over time, the streams and ponds were covered and filled. Bridges were built up and tunnels dynamited. The waters were fished so intensively that they contained fewer and fewer fish.
Human waste filled the waterways as the population jumped from a little over 33,000 people in 1790 to over 1.4 million in 1890. Garbage scows trucked out into the harbor to open their mouths and drop out refuse, much of which would only drift back to shore. Dead horses and cows were also thrown into the rivers, where their bloated and stinking bodies floated in and out with the tides.
As industry and commerce took over, all the city didn’t want was shunted to the waterfront: breweries, brothels, bars, slaughterhouses, shantytowns. The people who came in from the water—rough and rowdy fishermen, clam men, boat men, and oyster men—were the most disreputable elements in any crowd, as though the water itself could taint a reputation.
Waterfront districts earned names like “Poverty Lane” and “Misery Row.” Vagrant children called “dock rats” bedded down under the East River piers “amidst the stench of the oozing tides and sewage,” wrote Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. They sometimes survived by pilfering from the cargoes of anchored ships, using rowboats as their getaway vehicles, and vanishing into the open pilings, too narrow for the larger ships pursuing them to follow. Meanwhile, Fifth Avenue in the dead center of the island, at greatest distance from the water, lined itself with mansions.
The industrial age had to have an outlet, and in New York City, the country’s manufacturing center, it was the waterways. Manhattan Island by the mid-nineteenth century was rimmed with meatpackers, coal yards, gasworks, ink factories, ribbon makers, iron works, breweries, bottling plants, bone boilers, dairies, slaughterhouses, glue factories, stockyards, tar dumps, garbage transfer stations, rubber factories, masonry yards, flour mills, icehouses, lumberyards, sugarhouses, distilleries, oil refineries, plumbing supply houses, and elevator and dumbwaiter manufacturers. They located on the water so they could ship in supplies and raw materials and move out their finished products. Yet the water was also their dump.
The Gowanus Creek, a mile-and-a-half-long finger jutting into western Brooklyn from New York Harbor, had once produced Brooklyn’s first notable export to Europe, oysters the size of dinner plates. In 1869 it was dredged to serve as an industrial canal, and by 1880, residents a mile away called it “a repulsive repository of rank odors,” suffering from the same abuse as Newtown Creek. Along with the canal’s tanneries, machine shops, sulfur producers, and one of the first chemical fertilizer factories was a dye works that colored the water the hue used that day in production, giving the canal the nickname “Lavender Lake.” Joseph Mitchell later wrote that sightseers would come to coal and lumber quays along the Gowanus to watch the black, bubbly water where the “rising and breaking of sludge bubbles makes the water seethe and spit.”
At the same time, the odor on Newtown Creek was becoming unbearable, even to people passing by on commuter trains with the windows closed. In the summer of 1881, Harper’s Weekly ran a three-week series of exposés describing people choking in their sleep from the stench. “Children grow pale and languish; the mother sees her babe sicken and die in her arms, and feels that it is the foul air that has stifled it.” Finally, the Fifteenth Ward Smelling Committee traveled up the creek to sniff out the source of the foul odors. Passing cargo ships, manure scows, a dog pound, and sausage factories where heaps of flesh rotted in open doorways, members of the committee judged the odors to be unremarkable. At last they reached a point near the oil refineries where “the stenches began asserting themselves with all the vigor of fully developed stenches.” What they had discovered was that the area had become an ecological wasteland.
Fires started easily at waterfront refineries off of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey. As a standard precautionary measure when a fire approached, workers would open the spigots for thousands of gallons of oil to flow out into the sea or just jettison barrels of petroleum and kerosene wholesale. One time, flames a hundred feet tall leapt from a gasoline barge on the Hudson near Midtown. Another time, a boiler on a Standard Oil tank steamer exploded off the coast of New Jersey and the vessel drifted out into the Upper Bay of New York Harbor, a blazing shell trailing in its wake burning naphtha—the chemical from which napalm takes its name—the water “lighted by some strange grotesque sun.”
But such environmental calamities were possibly secondary to the impact of human sewage. By 1910, the number of people living in New York City had increased to more than 4,700,000. In the past, some of the city’s sewage had partially decomposed in streams and cesspools, so that whatever was eventually dumped in the harbor was less potent. Now new indoor plumbing efficiently piped raw waste directly to the rivers with no treatment at all.