Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City by Catherine McNeur (review)

In Taming Manhattan, Catherine McNeur further integrates environmental history with both social history and urban history. Relying on thorough research into periodicals and city archives, McNeur examines “the contested nature of urban growth and progress” through a series of environmental battles over the healthfulness of a rapidly growing New York City (2). These battles frequently pitted politicians and elite reformers against the city’s poor.

For the city’s elite, McNeur writes, “Taking control of the streets was a means to define boundaries between public and private, urban and rural, rich and poor” (198). The boundaries they endeavored to establish were intended to create a more healthful and orderly city, one that favored genteel, tree-lined residential neighborhoods and pastoral parks over the muck-producing agricultural uses of the poor. Poor New Yorkers, for their part, defended the “urban commons” (3). With this urban commons concept, McNeur builds on the work of environmental historians who have applied E.P. Thompson’s “moral economy” to environmental struggles. In antebellum New York, McNeur argues, trash-strewn and mud- and manure-filled streets provided sustenance for poor city folk and their animals, and also materials for reuse and sale. Taming Manhattan would require closing the urban commons on which the poor relied for day-to-day survival.

Among the first public health threats lawmakers targeted were wild dogs and hogs. Though dogs had little economic utility, laws that encouraged the mass slaughter of stray canines met resistance from News Yorkers of all classes. While middle-class and wealthy New Yorkers bemoaned the impact such displays of cruelty had on children the working class fought back to protect their treasured companions. Hogs, by contrast, were vital as scavengers and alternate food sources for the poor, and resistance to pig laws in the city’s outer wards effectively stymied their enforcement. The city’s elite, however, did not lament the removal of pigs, for, to them, swine represented the city’s filthiness and backwardness. Especially during the 1810s and 1820s, grassroots resistance helped preserve parts of the urban commons.

The cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849 served as significant turning points in buttressing the city government’s authority to act in the interest of public health. Public Health Wardens inspected private spaces and in the process eliminated the public/private divide. Sanitation efforts and the liberal application of nuisance laws led to more systematic street cleaning and the closing of offal plants around Manhattan. The spread of cholera also affirmed the necessity of bringing clean water to the city through the Croton aqueduct and a large, centralized park to function as the lungs of the city.

Despite the presence of homeowners and squatters on the future site of Central Park, and in spite of resistance from those residents, New York would proceed with the mapping and construction of Central Park. Among the first features of the urban commons to be removed in order to make way for the park and surrounding properties were noisome piggeries. Replacing shantytowns and piggeries with a pastoral park where resource use was banned highlighted an interesting irony in the taming of Manhattan: “The rural antidote for urban ills came at the expense of what was truly rural about the city” (219).

McNeur’s focus on the urban commons not only brings new stories to light, but also sheds new light on old stories; unfortunately, at times the voices of poor New Yorkers get lost in McNeur’s narrative. Although this is no doubt a consequence of the scarcity of sources, at times the battles McNeur describes seem one-sided. Moreover, in her discussion of the city’s response to cholera epidemics, McNeur counters the argument that municipal government’s efforts to improve the environment were motivated by a fear of immigrants and outsiders. She contends, instead, that these efforts were a thoughtful response to unwieldy urbanization and the outbreak of epidemics. No doubt there was real concern for public health behind legislators’ actions. Yet given...