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?
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.
New York employed street sweepers.
White Wings on review:
This and other related questions are covered in The Good Old Days – They Were Terrible 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.
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 seem to remember reading that horses deposited 40 tons of manure on the streets of New York daily.
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.
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.
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!
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? 
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.
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”
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.
And, remember – no screens.
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.
They were called crossing sweepers. One famous example is Jo in Bleak House.
Worse than that. Far worse.
From here
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]. 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