Taming Manhattan: environmental battles in the antebellum city

Abstract

TAMING MANHATTAN: Environmental Battles in Antebellum City. By Catherine McNeur. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2014.In Taming Manhattan, Catherine McNeur further integrates environmental history with both social history and history. Relying on thorough research into periodicals and city archives, McNeur examines the contested nature of growth and progress through a series of environmental battles over healthfulness of a rapidly growing New York City (2). These battles frequently pitted politicians and elite reformers against city's poor.For city's elite, McNeur writes, Taking control of streets was a means to define boundaries between public and private, and rural, rich and (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 muck-producing agricultural uses of poor. Poor New Yorkers, for their part, defended urban (3). With this commons concept, McNeur builds on work of environmental historians who have applied E.P. Thompson's moral economy to environmental struggles. In antebellum New York, McNeur argues, trashstrewn 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 commons on which poor relied for day-to-day survival.Among first public health threats lawmakers targeted were wild dogs and hogs. Though dogs had little economic utility, laws that encouraged mass slaughter of stray canines met resistance from News Yorkers of all classes. While middle-class and wealthy New Yorkers bemoaned impact such displays of cruelty had on children working class fought back to protect their treasured companions. Hogs, by contrast, were vital as scavengers and alternate food sources for poor, and resistance to pig laws in city's outer wards effectively stymied their enforcement. The city's elite, however, did not lament removal of pigs, for, to them, swine represented city's filthiness and backwardness. Especially during 1810s and 1820s, grassroots resistance helped preserve parts of commons.The cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849 served as significant turning points in buttressing city government's authority to act in interest of public health. Public Health Wardens inspected private spaces and in process eliminated public/private divide. …