On Fertility

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Kelly Murphy for her research assistance and many insights into the topic.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJane HuttonJane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she is faculty director to the Loeb Library Materials Collection. Her work focuses on the extended relationships of material practice in landscape architecture, looking at links between the landscapes of production and consumption of common construction materials. Hutton is a founding editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy and is coeditor of Issues: 01 Service, 02 Materialism, and 06 Mexico D.F./NAFTA.Notes1 The Committee on Civic Cleanliness and the Economic Disposition of the Refuse of Cities, appointed in 1859, was charged with plans for the disposal of “Offal, Refuse, Street-cleanings, and Nightsoil of cities.” See Egbert Viele, Report of the Committee on Civic Cleanliness and the Economic Disposition of the Refuse of Cities (New York: Edmund Jones, 1860).2 Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985).3 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, “A Review of Recent Changes, and Changes Which Have Been Projected, in the Plans of the Central Park,” in Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, edited by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 250.4 George Waring, Earth Closets: How to Make Them and How to Use Them (New York: Tribune Association, 1869).5 Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park 1862 (New York: Wm. C. Bryant, 1864), 87.6 Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park 1862 (New York: Wm. C. Bryant, 1862), 120.7 Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, Seventh Annual Report (note 5).8 Joel Tarr and Clay McShane, “The Centrality of the Horse to the Nineteenth-Century American City,” in The Making of Urban America, edited by Raymond Mohl (New York: SR Publishers, 1997), 121.9 George Waring, “The Disposal of a City's Waste,” North American Review (July 1895), 55 (reprint; copyright 1895, by Lloyd Bryor).10 Roy Rosenzsweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 296.11 Ibid., 222.12 Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, for the Year Ending December 31, 1869 (New York: Evening Post Steam Presses, 1870).13 Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, Fifth Annual Report (note 6), 120.14 “Fertilizing the Park Lawns,” New York Tribune, February 15, 1885, 4.15 Joan H. Geismar, “Where Is Night Soil? Thoughts on an Urban Privy,” Historical Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1993), 61.16 Joanne Abel Goldman, Building New York's Sewers: Developing Mechanisms of Urban Management (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1997), 25.17 Peter Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).18 “Poudrette—Soiling,” The Cultivator, June 1842, 93.19 “Poudrette as a Fertilizer—The N.Y. Poudrette Co. &c.,” The American Farmer, and Spirit of the Agricultural Journals of the Day (1839–1850), June 23, 1841, 39.20 Joel Tarr. “City to Farm: Urban Wastes and the Farmer.” Agricultural History, 49, no. 4 (October 1975): 605.21 “Night-soil—Its Value and Preparation for Use,” The Cultivator, November 1857, 352.22 Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985).23 Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion. (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), 2.24 Ibid.25 Viele, Report of the Committee on Civic Cleanliness (note 1), 26.26 . Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush (note 23), 15.27 “Guano. Its History, Traffic, Uses, Abuses, and Frauds,” New York Daily Tribune, September 29, 1860, 8.28 Edmund Rodman, “American Guano,” Maine Farmer, June 2, 1859, I.29 “Life on a Guano Island,” New York Times, September 9, 1866, 2.30 “Baker's Island Guano,” New York Daily Tribune, May 11, 1857, 3.31 Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, Seventh Annual Report (note 5), 87.32 Viele, Report of the Committee on Civic Cleanliness (note 1), 26.