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A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash
Author Adrienne Morris
The Writing Life at Middlemay Farm
About
When not writing novels, you can find me knee-deep in farm muck.
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Author Adrienne Morris 
15 responses to “A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash”
All major cities in the world started out like this. Many were like this until pretty recently. And nowadays, when Municipalities get it wrong with sanitation and garbage collection, cities start to regress… Witness Rome…
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True. We should all be very thankful for the waste management systems we have today in the West. Not perfect, but better than pigs rushing down the lanes and dead horses everywhere!
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Colourful image 🙂
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That horse breaks my heart.
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Yeah, me too. Horses are such magnificent creatures and have been through so much with humans. The good. the bad, the ugly.
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Sad how the children seem to be unaffected by the horse.
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That’s really the disturbing part for me (aside from the thing puncturing the horse). Ugh.
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Might be hard to believe, but all that was actually an improvement on the mid to late 1800s, when poor people raised pigs — thousands of them — on the street and processed them near Central Park or at the corner butcher shop. Of course, pigs ate some of the garbage, but they also left waste everywhere, and the processing made parts of New York unbearable. Hard to believe what people will put up with. Thank goodness for sanitation visionaries.
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I visited a garbage dump in Nicaragua where people lived full-time on trash. Rich people sometimes dropped off live cattle for the people to butcher. It was like being in hell.
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Yes– there are many hard places in this world.
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And yet, it is endlessly amazing to see people rise — or be drawn — above the horror. Ever heard of the Landfill Harmonic? Paraguay garbage dump people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJxxdQox7n0 — truly inspiring.
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Yes, I have seen them. Definitely a bright spot in an otherwise dismal situation. The Managua garbage dump residents seemed pretty hopeless to me. Most of the kids were glue-sniffers (their parents too). Doctors from other countries tried to help and many people tried to get them set up elsewhere but many returned. It was an incredibly savage and dangerous place too. We were warned before we entered.
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So tragic. Remarkable that you got to see it. Few people know how bad things can be.
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It really was an eye-opener. A Lord of the Flies situation. The dump was a lawless no-go zone. Only weird Christians like the group I was with attempted to go there. LOL. We handed out cookies and boxes of milk to the children (surreal). Then we went to a civilized mall and had lunch at the food court.
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Fascinating. I have see that horse picture before – it still shocks
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