The Living City: Engineering Social and Urban Change in New York City, 1865 to 1920

Memory plays an immense trick on most of us who write about the history of New York. We often depend on memoirs that shroud its past in a glorious aura that contrasts dramatically with our view of today’s city. In the writings of politicians, authors, and even some historians, the city of the last generation seems marvelously exciting, exhilarating, organized, and wholesome. In contrast, today’s city is often portrayed as overwhelmingly burdened by the signs and symptoms of decay and dissolution. In the early 1970s, Otto Bettman, who collected and cataloged thousands of photographs of nineteenth-century New York, characterized this process as the creation of a “benevolent haze” that leaves us “with the image of an ebullient, carefree America.” ¹

Certainly, today’s city is spared few social, urban, and public health problems. Rats, cockroaches, garbage, polluted water, and collapsing buildings are among New York’s persistent challenges. African-Americans and Asian and Latino immigrants, who pay the highest percentages of income toward rent, endure decrepit housing, rat infestation, poor ventilation, lack of heat in winter, and plumbing malfunctions, while inner-city neighborhoods deprived of essential municipal services suffer from the aftermath of fire, homelessness, AIDS, and substance abuse.

Yet, without apologizing for today’s inequities, historian Nancy Tomes reminds us that “the past was once a far more dangerous place.” ² Certainly, there are aspects of periods past that should be recalled and even celebrated. But, as the history of disease in the city all too clearly illustrates, it is dangerous to lament the passing of supposedly golden eras and to characterize the present as a period of decline and disintegration. It is equally dangerous, however, to delineate sharply the world of a century ago from our own.

Our project The Living City—both a digital library initiative and a dynamic, multimedia resource ³ —suggests the need for an effort, not merely to place current problems in historical context, but to reconsider the technological and scientific environment within which broader social changes occurred in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century city. Indeed, it suggests a need to see the city—its neighborhoods, buildings, sewers, water works, subways, and network of municipal services—as a living, evolving entity connecting past attempts to engineer answers to persistent problems to our contemporary health and social welfare predicaments.

New York City from 1865 to 1920 provides an unparalleled opportunity to study closely the built city. During these decades between the end of the Civil War and the end of World War I, the city underwent profound changes in its population, its geographic boundaries, and its economic and social base, as well as in its physical infrastructure. During this period science and technology were brought to bear on the problems of urban industrial America. Disease, in particular, stood at the crossroads of the myriad social, cultural, environmental, and infrastructural problems in the rapidly growing city. The Living City is, therefore, an initiative to reconstruct New York City from 1865 to 1920, capturing the experience of life, health, and urban transformation in America’s major urban center using key sanitary data and reports, which became paradigms for national social, health, and urban policy.

Five sets of published—but rare and, to date, hard to plumb—documents trace the interplay among sanitary engineering, technology, laboratory science, society, and culture in structuring the “healthful” urban environment. John Griscom’s 1845 report, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York, provides a vivid and sympathetic account of the living conditions of the working class at mid-century. Griscom located the causes of disease in the environmental conditions beyond the control of the poor. His report, accordingly, was intent on improving the condition of the impoverished, and he recommended extending the sewerage system, constructing adequate working-class housing, reforming the tenements, and providing free access to water from the Croton Aqueduct. ⁴ In short, Griscom advocated a “sanatory regeneration of society.” ⁵ Griscom’s report is an important benchmark for measuring the subsequent transformation of the...