New York City

Early History

In 1657, when nearly 800 people lived at the tip of Manhattan Island in the Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam, trash-related problems were serious enough to require legislative attention for the first time. Residents were prohibited from throwing “any rubbish, filth, oyster shells, dead animals or anything like it” into the streets. Householders had to sweep in front of their homes once a week, load the sweepings into carts, and dump their garbage only in specific locations.

After the town came under British control, the frequency with which similar laws were passed suggests that they were only intermittently enforced or obeyed. Chamber pot contents, offal, and household trash were regularly tossed into the streets. Trash ended up in the East and North rivers because residents dumped it there, but garbage was also used to help create bulkheads and piers, expand the shoreline, and fill marshes. In the 21st century, half of Manhattan below Chambers Street is “made land,” and the banks of the East River are a full three blocks from the island's original edge; much of that geography was created with trash.

Early Industry and Disease

At the turn of the 18th century, when New York was home to about 5,000 people, a combination of private and public labor was used for sweeping and garbage collection. Problems with regular garbage—most of which spent time moldering in the alleys and avenues—were exacerbated by growing commercial concerns like breweries, slaughterhouses, and tallow chandlers. Some of these businesses opened next to residential dwellings and freely added their wastes to the streets, while others preferred a small lake called the Fresh Water (or Collect) Pond, just north of the city proper. It had been a source of potable water long before Europeans arrived, but it was becoming a convenient place for “noxious trades” to discharge spent dyes, acids, and entrails.

This situation was a factor in one of the city's first widespread public health disasters. Yellow fever, then known as “pestilential distemper,” struck in the summer of 1702, claiming more than one-tenth of the city's population. Throughout the first decades of the 18th century, yellow fever killed many New Yorkers, as did diseases like smallpox, whooping cough, and measles. After a careful citywide survey in 1740, a physician named Cadwallader Colden pointed out that such scourges were most devastating in the dirtiest neighborhoods and argued for cleaning up odiferous swamps, effluent-laced gutters, damp cellars, and sloppy markets. The Common Council agreed. Slips were dredged, markets were moved, nuisance trades were forced away from residential areas, and sanitary codes were mandated. As Colden had predicted, diseases that occurred after these reforms found fewer victims.

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