Recently, I was reading the Annual Report of the State Board of Health of New York, 1880-1. (What. Why is that funny?) It includes an inquiry into why New York’s cities (and especially New York City) were so filthy and smelled so appalling. By the time this report was created, a series of devastating cholera epidemics had occurred, and thanks to the work of Pasteur and Koch, people were starting to understand how diseases were transmitted. So city officials everywhere were finally taking steps to clean things up.
Here are some of their proposed sanitary ordinances. The idea that they had to make laws against these practices suggests that infractions must have been commonplace and widespread, a scary thought:
“No privy-vault, cesspool or reservoir…except it be water-tight [emphasis mine], shall be established or permitted within fifty feet of any well, spring or other source of water used for drinking or culinary purposes.” And every privy vault shall be cleaned “at least once before the first of May in each year.”
By now they’d established that cholera was a water-borne illness, so this is definitely progress. Still, they had to pass an ordinance about cleaning cesspools once a year.
It continues:
“No house-offal, dead animals or refuse of any kind shall be thrown upon the streets…and no butcher, fish-monger or vendor of merchandise of any kind, shall leave any refuse upon the streets…and all putrid and decaying animal or vegetable matter must be removed from all cellars and out-buildings at least once in each year. [emphasis mine].
“No tanner, refiner, or manufacturer of gas, starch, leather, chemicals, fertilizers…shall throw, deposit, or allow to run, or to be thrown into any public waters.”
“Any householder in whose dwelling there shall occur a case of cholera, yellow-fever, typhus or typhoid fever, scarlet-fever, diphtheria or small-pox shall immediately notify the board of health of same…”
It’s a sobering document about city living in 1881, to say the least. 