Instead, it was technological innovation that made the difference. This was not brought about by regulation or by government policy. Then, almost overnight, the crisis passed. Unable to agree upon any solutions-or to imagine cities without horses-the delegates broke up the meeting, which had been scheduled to last a week and a half, after just three days. When the world’s first international urban-planning conference was held, in 1898, it was dominated by discussion of the manure situation. It was understood that flies were a transmission vector for disease, and a public-health crisis seemed imminent. New York’s troubles were not New York’s alone in 1894, the Times of London forecast that by the middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure. One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows. The problem just kept piling up until, in the eighteen-nineties, it seemed virtually insurmountable. smelling to heaven.” In the early part of the century, farmers in the surrounding counties had been happy to pay for the city’s manure, which could be converted into rich fertilizer, but by the later part the market was so glutted that stable owners had to pay to have the stuff removed, with the result that it often accumulated in vacant lots, providing breeding grounds for flies. George Waring, Jr., who served as the city’s Street Cleaning Commissioner, described Manhattan as stinking “with the emanations of putrefying organic matter.” Another observer wrote that the streets were “literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting. Each one relieved itself of, on average, twenty-two pounds of manure a day, meaning that the city’s production of horse droppings ran to at least forty-five thousand tons a month. By 1880, there were at least a hundred and fifty thousand horses living in New York, and probably a great many more. Horses were also employed to transport goods as the amount of freight arriving at the city’s railroad terminals increased, so, too, did the number of horses needed to distribute it along local streets. Additional horses were needed if the route ran up a grade, or if the weather was hot. Each horse could work only a four-hour shift, so operating a single car required at least eight animals. The standard horsecar, which seated twenty, was drawn by a pair of roans and ran sixteen hours a day. (The Herald described the experience of travelling by omnibus as a form of “modern martyrdom.”) New Yorkers made some thirty-five million horsecar trips a year at the start of the decade. The horsecars, which operated on iron rails, offered a smoother ride than the horse-drawn omnibuses they replaced. In the eighteen-sixties, the quickest, or at least the most popular, way to get around New York was in a horse-drawn streetcar. “SuperFreakonomics” has some ideas for reëngineering the planet.
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