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

In Catherine McNeur's meticulously researched environmental history of antebellum New York City, laborers and elites wrestle for control over space in the booming city. Taming Manhattan explores the battles waged by the people literally sloshing around in the trough of urbanization that was New York between 1815 and 1865. Her focus is on the loss of the "de facto urban commons" that had long been used by the poor to raise livestock and run recycling businesses and the efforts of the municipal government to control the process through legislation (7). As the city matured, elites began clearing this quasi-common land for residences and parks. McNeur shows how efforts to "tame" the city came at the expense of the poor: "One man's nuisance, of course, was another's livelihood" (7).

The first chapter, "Mad Dogs and Loose Hogs" centers on two pieces of legislation: the 1811 "Law Concerning Dogs" and the hog law of 1817. Both rich and poor resisted the restrictions on dogs, which established the position of a Dog Register and Collector empowered to collect taxes for dog licenses. The wealthy wrote letters to the editors of city newspapers about their maligned pets, while the poor physically blocked dog catchers' carts. The description of the mass slaughter of street dogs in the 1830s enabled by the law is the first of many graphic scenes that render visceral McNeur's accounts of legislative maneuvers and class politics.

Chapter 2, "Unequally Green," recounts the prehistory of Central Park, with stories of antecedents planned or built in the 1830s and 1840s, including Gramercy Park and Union Square, both of which were built for wealthy residents but financed with tax breaks and special assessments passed by the Common Council that left renters "voiceless in the city government when it came to parks and other public works paid for by assessments" and set the stage for the unequal distribution of park space throughout the city (81). "The placement of public parks in the urban landscape," she concludes, "became an expression of social and political inequity" (81).

The following chapter, "The Dung Heap of the Universe," analyzes the nuisance laws that accompanied sanitary reform following cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849. "Taming the city's filth," she points out, required the municipal government to regulate the city's manure businesses, a task it accomplished with varying success (132). McNeur's description in this chapter of the poudrette industry, which converted human waste into fertilizer, is especially interesting.

The strongest section of the book is chapter 5, "Hog Wash and Swill Milk," which traces the arguments behind and opposition to nuisance laws that regulated everything from dogs and hogs to squatters. McNeur's talent for suspenseful writing shines in her description of the so-called Piggery War of 1859. Her analysis of the offal industry is similarly gripping, and the highlight of the book. New York's soaring population made the disposal of food waste an enormous, and enormously contentious, task in the 1850s and 1860s. Refuse was not hauled off to landfills or carted off to sea, as it would be in later eras. Instead, it was burned or reused. There emerged a robust ragpicking industry as the poor (mainly German and Irish immigrants, with some African Americans) scavenged bones, offal, and food waste—or, in some cases, bought it from hotels, butcher shops, and slaughterhouses—and carted it to bone-boiling establishments. McNeur takes us to the sprawling shantytowns located on the northern fringes of the city where this waste was stored and processed. "On unwanted land, using unwanted materials," McNeur explains, "these New Yorkers scraped together a living" (137). In the wake of two cholera epidemics, however, elite New Yorkers successfully petitioned for the closure of the businesses, whose foul smells and visual disorder offended the increasingly delicate sensibilities of the urban middle class. The result was worse: the...