Cleaning the streets in the horse and wagon days

[Baker]

Here's a question for the Perfect Master!

How did the streets get cleaned, (or did they) in "the old days"? Folks nowadays complain about smog and exhaust fumes, but was was a big city like, say, New York, on a hot summer's day in July, back when horses were our mode of transport?

Were there folks whose job it was to sweep streets, or did horse manure just get trod on and rolled over, until it gradually disintegrated?

[Electronic Chaos]

I don't know about back then, but in modern times with a horse-drawn carriage, a canvas bag is positioned below the horse's rear end for the express purpose of catching manure.

I imagine a similar device was used at least occasionally back then.

I remember being amazed as a youngster that a horse would use the bathroom while walking.

[Squink]

New York employed street sweepers.
White Wings on review: (http://www.ushistoricalarchive.com/cds/nyfilmsv2.html) Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 1903.
Filmed on an unidentified street in New York City, probably Fifth Avenue. Rows of men wearing the white uniforms of New York City street sweepers (known as White Wings) march by the camera. Each row has a police escort. The parade of uniformed men continues until several hundred pass. Immediately following the marching men come approximately a hundred horse-drawn two-wheel carts of the kind used for hauling garbage [Frame: 3394]. One four wheeled cart is seen near the end of the film. In 1895, under the reform administration of Mayor William L. Strong, New York City's Department of Street Cleaning was headed by Colonel George Waring. It was he who garbed his workers in the white duck suits (earning them the name "White Wings") seen in the film. He is also recognized as a brilliant sanitary engineer who marshalled the two thousand man force to clean four hundred and fifty miles of streets each day.Of course: (http://www.officersrow.org/history.htm) a dichotomy between Officer’s Row and the surrounding neighborhood can be evident as early as 1900. A letter to the editor of the New York Times, written by Peter Hetto, demonstrates the inequity of sanitation service in the area. “Take Flushing Avenue, for instance, from Navy Street to Wallabout market, said [horse] manure is laying inch deep along the navy yard wall, blown there by the wind. Three “white wings” [New York City street sweepers] make their appearance at 7:30 at the corner of Navy and Flushing and sweep in front of the officers’ quarters along Flushing Avenue. Further up they are never seen.”

[RealityChuck]

This and other related questions are covered in The Good Old Days -- They Were Terrible (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Old-Days-They-Were-Terrible/dp/0394709411/sr=8-1/qid=1168350446/ref=sr_1_1/103-4196366-0001433?ie=UTF8&s=books) by Otto Bettman (You may recognize the name of the author from the Bettman Archives -- used by nearly all authors who need historical photos).

At their worst, the streets of major cities were garbage dumps. The book has some photos of abandioned "trucks" (as they called wagons in those days) with three-foot piles of garbage piled under them (see page 9 for a photo, or search inside the book on Amazon for "trucks" to find it. Page 7 has a drawing that makes it look even worse). Garbage collection and waste cleaning was hit-or-miss, with people reneging on their contracts to clean things up.

Bettman does overstate his case -- showing only the worst of all conditions -- but it is all documented. The pollution in a major city prior to 1900 was at levels not even the most anti-environmental fanatic would stand for.

[David Simmons]

The above posts are my recollection. I grew up in a small town and somewhat after horses were the main method for transportation but there were still plenty of them around. As I remember, the horse manure just lay there until it was run over, flattened out, dried and blew away. Cities had street cleaners but as the above posts indicate they weren't entirely up to the job.

[galen]

I seem to remember reading that horses deposited 40 tons of manure on the streets of New York daily.

[Slithy Tove]

In the summer it would turn to dust and get on everything. The upstairs maids would constantly be cleaning the brown grime off women's clothes. And the flies would feast on it and then land on everything left out in the kitchen. Any nostalgia for the era should be seasoned with a pinch of atomized horseshit in the nostrils.

[CalMeacham]

They had street sweepers -- and they were necessary, and probably inadequate. What do you think that guy with the broom and garbage can was meant to pick up at the end credits of "Peabody's Improbable History" -- confetti?

Gene Wilder played such a sweeper in the movie Quackser Fortune has a Cousin in the Bronx.

[ralph124c]

yes, Bettman's book was spot on. Re: horse manure: one side effect was that American cities were home to jillions of flies-they were verywhere. in fact, the bird population 9and bats too) was probably orders of magnitude higher-they fed off all of those juicy flies! and those dead horse-they were sent to rendering plants-and made into glue. American cities were filthy-and the advent of the automobile made cities a LOT cleaner! yeah-the good old days!

[KlondikeGeoff]

The above posts are my recollection. I grew up in a small town and somewhat after horses were the main method for transportation but there were still plenty of them around. As I remember, the horse manure just lay there until it was run over, flattened out, dried and blew away. Cities had street cleaners but as the above posts indicate they weren't entirely up to the job.

I grew up mostly in NYC (Brooklyn, Queens) during the 30s. Surprisingly, there were still a lot of horse-drawn wagons delivering milk, ice, vegetables, etc. Also many old-clothes buyers and other vendors plied the streets with horse and wagon.

I do recall the white-clad sweepers with big push brooms and shovel pushing a two-wheeled can about the size of a 55-gal oil drum, sans top. They got some not most of the manure.

Wonder if the got paid by the hour or the pound? :D

[JohnT]

Here's a question for the Perfect Master!

How did the streets get cleaned, (or did they) in "the old days"? Folks nowadays complain about smog and exhaust fumes, but was was a big city like, say, New York, on a hot summer's day in July, back when horses were our mode of transport?

Were there folks whose job it was to sweep streets, or did horse manure just get trod on and rolled over, until it gradually disintegrated?

They hired people to clean it up.

Hell, tanners in 19th-century London would hire people to gather up dog crap, to be used in the tanning process.

[CalMeacham]

Hell, tanners in 19th-century London would hire people to gather up dog crap, to be used in the tanning process.


Shoe-polish makers, too, according to the book The Professor and the Madman. They called it "Pure", which seems pretty ironic, but probably wasn't meant to be.


Gives a new meaning to "not knowing shit from Shinola"

[Rube E. Tewesday]

In one of Tony Robinson's "Worst Jobs in History" TV shows, he mentions the guys in Victorian London who would stand at street corners with brooms, and in return for a meagre tip, sweep the street so a person of quality could walk across with more or less clean shoes.

[RealityChuck]

yes, Bettman's book was spot on. Re: horse manure: one side effect was that American cities were home to jillions of flies-they were verywhere. in fact, the bird population 9and bats too) was probably orders of magnitude higher-they fed off all of those juicy flies! and those dead horse-they were sent to rendering plants-and made into glue. American cities were filthy-and the advent of the automobile made cities a LOT cleaner! yeah-the good old days!And, remember -- no screens.

[Spavined Gelding]

I have a 1908 panoramic photo of my little town. It shows three automobiles, all with right hand tillers, and maybe 30 to 40 horses and mules. The street are dirt with some sort of flagstone paths at the cross walks and raised plank sidewalks. My guess is that the manure was simply beaten into a powder by the traffic and allowed to amalgamate with the road surface. It must have been a delight in wet weather and during the great spring break-up. We finally got brick streets right after WWI.

[CalMeacham]

I have a 1908 panoramic photo of my little town. It shows three automobiles, all with right hand tillers, and maybe 30 to 40 horses and mules. The street are dirt with some sort of flagstone paths at the cross walks and raised plank sidewalks. My guess is that the manure was simply beaten into a powder by the traffic and allowed to amalgamate with the road surface. It must have been a delight in wet weather and during the great spring break-up. We finally got brick streets right after WWI.


Oh, it's much better than that -- the manure-turned-to-dust would blow around in the wind, eventually getting into your house through the window. In the summer you could have your choice of suffocating in an unventilated house in the city, or letting the poop-dust blow through.

Women's skirts practically touched the ground, or dragged in it.

Those carriages and two-wheeled carts threw dirt and mud from the road up onto you when you rode in them (Sherlock Holmes is always talking about mud thrown up onto clothing by dog-carts). That mud contained a fair proportion of manure or manure dust mixed in. Even if the cabman had a blanket to cover you, imagine covering up with a street-mud-infested blanket. It makes me wonder why they didn't have more fenders.

Rich folk in the city either had their houses well set back from the street, or else lived on upper floors, away from the dust.

[Rayne Man]

In one of Tony Robinson's "Worst Jobs in History" TV shows, he mentions the guys in Victorian London who would stand at street corners with brooms, and in return for a meagre tip, sweep the street so a person of quality could walk across with more or less clean shoes.

They were called crossing sweepers. One famous example is Jo in Bleak House.

[slaphead]

I seem to remember reading that horses deposited 40 tons of manure on the streets of New York daily.
Worse than that. Far worse.
From here (http://webdiary.smh.com.au/archives/michael_ekin_smyth/000734.html)
In the 1870s engineers warned Queen Victoria that, if London’s population grew beyond four million, transport-derived pollutants – horse manure - would overwhelm the city. The population did pass four million in Victoria’s lifetime, and the city didn’t disappear under a tidal wave of steaming dung, although it must have smelt like it was going to at times.

There were around 50,000 horses providing the energy for transport in central London alone. Apparently one horse produces somewhere between five and fifteen kilos of dung and more than a litre of urine every day. More than a thousand tonnes of manure were carted out of the city each day.
The problem was as bad in other big cities. Dead horses were a major pollutant. In the 1880s about 15,000 horse carcasses were removed annually from the streets of New York

[ralph124c]

Are there any modern estimates of how polluted London's air was in 1900? What with soft-coal heating fires, decomposing horse manure, the fumes from all the horse urine, and the cesspool-like Thames, London must have been pretty horriffic! I'll take cars anyday-the motor car must have been a major relief-imagine- cleaning up all of that horse manure!

[slaphead]

Are there any modern estimates of how polluted London's air was in 1900? What with soft-coal heating fires, decomposing horse manure, the fumes from all the horse urine, and the cesspool-like Thames, London must have been pretty horriffic! I'll take cars anyday-the motor car must have been a major relief-imagine- cleaning up all of that horse manure!
I have no idea, but it would indeed have been pretty damn horrific. Interestingly, people have tried calculating pollution from Monet paintings [PDF] (http://www.iop.org/activity/groups/subject/env/Previous_Events/file_7417.pdf). This presentation also mentions some work done by a lighting company in 1900 that showed visibility was less than 1.5 miles all winter(!).
It's a bit earlier than you want, but some articles by Marx and Engels give a pretty good idea of just how grotty things could get. Make the appropriate adjustments for political views, but they are still accurate reportage. The Great Towns - 1845 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch04.htm)

[Lissa]

Hell, tanners in 19th-century London would hire people to gather up dog crap, to be used in the tanning process.

Well, not hired. Pure collectors were freelance, selling buckets of turds to tanneries rather than recieving a salary or hourly wage. You could make a fairly decent wage at it if you had a regular source. Surprisingly, to modern sensibilities, this was considered to be a "higher" profession than rag or bone collectors.

Here (http://www.victorianlondon.org/frame-professions.htm) excerpt from a book called Labour and Poor, 1849-50 by Henry Mayhew.


What they look for most is the "pure." Some of the regular collectors of this article have been mechanics, and others small tradesmen. They are a superior class of persons to the mere rag and bonepickers, and those who have a good connection and the right of cleansing certain kennels obtain a very fair living at it, earning from 10s. to l5s. a week. These, however, are very few. The majority have to seek the article solely in the streets, and by such means they can obtain only from 6s. to 10s. a week. The average weekly earnings of this class are thought to be between 7s. and 8s. The "pure" gatherer, after he has been his rounds, makes the best of his way to some tanner in Bermondsey, to whom he is in the habit of selling the article. He sells it to the tanner by the stable bucketful, and gets from 8d. to 10d. per bucket for it. It is used for the purpose of cleansing sheep and calf skins after they are taken out of the "lime-pits." A man generally picks up about a bucketful in the course of the day. My informant earned last week 5s. 2d., and the week before about 6s.; and these he believes to be a fair sample of the earnings of the class. He has been at the calling about four years. He was originally in the Manchester cotton trade, and held a lucrative situation in a large country establishment. His salary one year exceeded £250, and his regular income was £150.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

The metal window screen is a modern invention.

Relect on this, in terms of manure, houseflies and high summer heat.

Keep the windows closed to keep swarms of flies out, & roast.
Keep em open, & get eaten alive.


BTW--I do not want to live in "the good old days", 'cause they weren't!

[Cervaise]

Are there any modern estimates of how polluted London's air was in 1900?This is discussed extensively in Barbara Freese's book Coal, which obviously focuses primarily on the subject of its title but has some good general discussions of air quality in London and elsewhere. Sample excerpt:On most days, the air of London was still cleaner than Manchester's [an industrial center that suffered greatly from air pollution], but under certain cold and windless conditions, the combined effect of smoke and fog could plunge London into almost complete darkness in the daytime, stopping much of the city in its tracks. Of one such day in 1812, the Times reported that "for the greater part of the day it was impossible to read or write at a window without artificial light. Persons in the streets could scarcely be seen in the forenoon at two yards distance." This was unusual enough to make it into the next day's paper, but not strange enough to warrant more than a brief mention.There's a lot more in the book. Recommended reading for anyone interested in the history of energy and industry and their impact on quality of life.

[rocking chair]

any reports from mac. island mich.?

that is one place in the u.s. that uses horse driven locomotion. granted the horses are used mostly in the non-snow months....but there aren't many places on the island where you can get away from the smell.

[LSLGuy]

I recall reading a stat that, based on 1970s car volume, if all the cars magically turned to horses, the freeways of LA would be 80 FEET deep in manure at the end of the first day.

A bit of a disposal problem.

[Baron Greenback]

I recall reading a stat that, based on 1970s car volume, if all the cars magically turned to horses, the freeways of LA would be 80 FEET deep in manure at the end of the first day.

A bit of a disposal problem.

Perhaps. If the horses were 1000-foot high behemoths with a diet of Taco Bell and Ex-Lax. Do you really believe that "statistic"?

[Slithy Tove]

Gives a new meaning to "not knowing shit from Shinola"

Not just tanners & bootblacks. When you look at Rembrandt's amazing use of light and shadow, you're looking at a surface masterfully smeared with shit.

In some's opinion, he got a little too carried away with it (possibly NSFW) (http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rmbrdnt_selected_etchings/selected_etchings_images/woman_urinating.jpg)

As we've learned from Cecil Adams, the brown in feces is from dead red blood cells. Before modern chemistry, we took our pigments where we found them.

[Lissla Lissar]

There's something mentioned in the Little House books, called mosquito-bar. I always interpreted it as a fine netting, and it's used to cover windows and doors. Did they not have it in the early 19th? When was it invented? Was it not in general use?

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

There's something mentioned in the Little House books, called mosquito-bar. I always interpreted it as a fine netting, and it's used to cover windows and doors. Did they not have it in the early 19th? When was it invented? Was it not in general use?

No, it is a form of mosquito netting, to be draped over a sleeping person in bed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_bar

[CalMeacham]

This brings up an interesting point - they had mosquito-bar in the 19th century. They also had fine mesh wire domes that they placed over food to keep the flies out (you can see some of these at places like Sturbridge Village, that recreate 19th century life), so why not put such screens, or even coarsely woven cloth (coarse enough to not block ventilation, but fine enough to keep out flies) over windows? Certainly the fact that they had these kinds of products shows that they had the technology. (And you wouldn't have to put it over all windows -- as anyone can tell you, having just one or two windows open -- but with screens -- makes an enormous difference from the syifling stuffiness of no open windows).


I asked the folks at Sturbridge about this once -- they were cooking in a country kitchen, and the place was swarming with flies, except for the dishes covered with flyscreens -- and they said that flies were simply accepted as part of life, and nobody even thought of trying to block them.


Of course, that's not the impression you get from the opening number of 1776, with the debate about open or closed windows in Congress. That scene was adapted from real life -- there was a stable around the corner, and in summer the horseflies were intolerable in Congress.

[Uncommon Sense]

Perhaps. If the horses were 1000-foot high behemoths with a diet of Taco Bell and Ex-Lax. Do you really believe that "statistic"?

Maybe 8 feet? or 80 inches....
80 feet seems quite much.
A stat like that would have to take into account the mileage (per vehicle day) and compare that to mileage (per horse day). If vehicles travelled 40 miles per day and horses 4-6 miles per day you'd have to take the average horse dung excreted and muliply it by a factor to make it equivolent to the car's travel.
So, were probably talking between 6-10 times the dung (which an earlier post stated was between 5-15 kilo's of dung per day would turn into 40-120 kilos per day multiplied by about 4 million cars.
Splitting the difference between 40-120 gives us 80 kilos/day * 4 million = 320,000,000 kilos per day of dung. Now divide that by the square footage of street in LA (I haven't the foggiest) and you'd be close to an answer.

[Bridget Burke]

Rich folk in the city either had their houses well set back from the street, or else lived on upper floors, away from the dust.

Why, Sir--nobody of any quality summers in the city!

One goes to one's little place in Newport. Or perhaps to one's camp in the Adirondacks.

[ralph124c]

I have no idea, but it would indeed have been pretty damn horrific. Interestingly, people have tried calculating pollution from Monet paintings [PDF] (http://www.iop.org/activity/groups/subject/env/Previous_Events/file_7417.pdf). This presentation also mentions some work done by a lighting company in 1900 that showed visibility was less than 1.5 miles all winter(!).
It's a bit earlier than you want, but some articles by Marx and Engels give a pretty good idea of just how grotty things could get. Make the appropriate adjustments for political views, but they are still accurate reportage. The Great Towns - 1845 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch04.htm)
Did the Victorians ever have swimming competitions in the thames, at London? I can't imagine that any of the rivers in England were fit for swimming at that time!
The good old days were not "clean old days!"

[CalMeacham]

Why, Sir--nobody of any quality summers in the city!


Maybe, but there were times when you were in the city that you'd like to have the windows open, even aside from the hottest and sultriest days of the summer. It gets warm in April, May, and early June

[RealityChuck]

This brings up an interesting point - they had mosquito-bar in the 19th century. They also had fine mesh wire domes that they placed over food to keep the flies out (you can see some of these at places like Sturbridge Village, that recreate 19th century life), so why not put such screens, or even coarsely woven cloth (coarse enough to not block ventilation, but fine enough to keep out flies) over windows? .Mesg metal screens could be made, but at a cost that was prohibitive. It's one thing to make one a couple of square feet in area to cover a bowl, and another to make one large enough to cover a single window.

Cloth was possible, but I think flies were just accepted as part of life (no germ theory).

[CalMeacham]

Mesg metal screens could be made, but at a cost that was prohibitive. It's one thing to make one a couple of square feet in area to cover a bowl, and another to make one large enough to cover a single window.

Cloth was possible, but I think flies were just accepted as part of life (no germ theory).


You only need a couple of square feet to fill a frame that fits in a window opened part way. I had such a screen on my window back in my pre-air-conditioned stident days. Certainly not beyond the creativity and ability of 19th century farmer-inventors. Especially guys like the ever-inventive Shakers.

And you could always use "panes" of tin pierced with holes -- that's how they made "pie safes" , and some lanterns. All you'd have to do is increase the number of holes. Work -- but not prohibitively hard or expensive.


I have t assume t falls in the bin of "everyone accepted it, so it wasn't seen as necessary." A cultural blind-spot. But I'm still surprised that the annoyance factor didn't prompt someone to come up with this. You don't need to have a Germ Theory of Disease to become exasperated with biting horseflies.

[Lissa]

Cloth was possible, but I think flies were just accepted as part of life (no germ theory).

I don't know how accepted they were, given the amount of mentions in housekeeping books of the day regarding how to combat them.

One was to place saucers around the room containing sugar and cream which would trap and drown the flies. (There were also various commercial fly traps which work on the same principle.) I have also heard mention of coating cedar boughs in molasses or other sticky sugar mixture and hanging it from the ceiling as a fly trap. I even have seen suggestions to add laundry bluing to paint because it supposedly repells flies.

Wealthy people would have a servant using a "fly swisher" over their heads during dinner parties. Flyswatters made of mesh were commonly available. Some sources mention burning a little pot of herbs as a repellent, but this doesn't seem to be as common.

[KlondikeGeoff]

...horseflies were intolerable in Congress.

As are Congressmen, even today. :D