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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City by Catherine McNeur Kate Mulry (bio) Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City. By Catherine McNeur. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 320. $29.95. Catherine McNeur’s excellent book examines the interconnected environmental, social, and economic transformations of a precipitously expanding New York City from the conclusion of the War of 1812 to the Civil War. During this turbulent period, the residents of Manhattan were caught up in the throes of an urbanizing city, radically remade by rapid population growth and by capital flowing into the city after the completion of the Erie Canal. McNeur furnishes her text with a range of fascinating stories, emphasizing the diversity of voices engaged in debates over the changing shape and character of the city. Residents disagreed about what belonged on the city’s streets and how to divide its resources. The chapters are roughly chronological and chart an overlapping story of the halting, though ultimately incomplete, acquisition of power by the municipal government over New Yorkers and their city in the name of progress, public health, and profit. Over the course of several decades officials and private citizens attempted, often ineffectively, to wrest control of the shared spaces of the city and its seemingly ungovernable residents. They battled to reform both the urban environment and human behavior in the process. According to McNeur, her monograph illuminates “the inextricable ties between social control and environmental control, and the desperate impulse to seize … power during times of overwhelming change” (p. 5). Indeed, reformers grew even more ambitious in the aftermath of cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849 due to the culture of fear the disease aroused; sanitation officials extended their reach into private homes. McNeur’s causal explanation for the “sweeping changes” made to [End Page 670] the structure of authority of New York in the wake of these health crises will interest historians of public health (p. 130). The strength of Taming Manhattan lies in the many remarkable lives and stories unearthed by McNeur. She begins by examining the haphazard efforts by the municipal government to clear the streets of roaming hogs and potentially rabid dogs. Elite New Yorkers turned up their noses at the urban poor for defying their visual and olfactory bourgeois sensibilities and dismissed the city’s poorer residents as the “swinish multitude,” equating the owners of hogs with their animals (p. 193). Their disdain stemmed from the lower classes’ use of the urban commons for survival, whether by scavenging ma-terials from street waste or allowing their hogs to forage for their own food. New York’s poor, especially recent immigrants and African Americans, recognized that campaigns to control loose hogs would result in their disinheritance. They fought back, often successfully, by ignoring legislation or circulating petitions. Sometimes they fought with fists. Chapters 3 and 4 track evolving concerns about living conditions. Reformers prevailed on officials to clean streets, manage waste, and regulate the production of corrupt foodstuffs like swill milk. In response, officials defined certain smells, sights, and sounds as “nuisances,” pushing offending establishments, including bone boilers and piggeries, to the edges of the city and beyond. McNeur convincingly argues that the actions of city government both reflected and produced ethnic and class divisions. If some New Yorkers battled over what properly belonged on city streets, others sought to cultivate elite enclaves. City officials enabled landowners and developers to create parks in the 1830s; they beautified sections of New York and benefited from a corresponding rise in property values. It was not until later in the century that reformers embraced city parks as spaces that might benefit all New Yorkers. McNeur’s final chapter examines the construction of Central Park. It was designed to promote public health by functioning as the “lungs” of the city. Strict rules regulated visitors’ behavior while green vistas instilled “rural virtues” (p. 176). While McNeur maintains a tight focus on the island of Manhattan and its residents, she intermittently gestures to Manhattan’s expanding ecological footprint. For instance, new technologies enabled water to flow into the city via the Croton Aqueduct system. Piles of animal manure were carted from city streets...