Gilded Manure

While I eagerly await the season three of Gilded Age, I recently rewatched the first two seasons.  I like the show, but I have a few picky little reservations.

First, I should admit that I am a big fan of Christine Baranski and would probably watch a lengthy miniseries that consisted of nothing but her snarky reading of the phone book.  And, I enjoy period dramas, if only to watch for the historical inaccuracies. 

I’m also a big fan of Gilded Age literature.  Who doesn’t enjoy reading Henry James, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris or Henry Adams?  Even the name for the period comes from a novel cowritten by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, though neither would live long enough to learn that historians used the title of the book for the name of the period of significant economic growth, industrialization, and social disparity in the United States from the 1870s to about 1900, that was characterized by ostentatious wealth for some and stark poverty for many.

Perhaps the biggest mistake is the television show have as its central theme the conflict between the old Mayflower settlers of New England and the New Money people who derived their wealth from the new industries.  There are actually two mistakes there:  first the true “Old New Yorkers” were Dutch, not English.  The Rockefellers, Stuyvesants, Van Rensselaers, and Schuylers and other families of Dutch origin (who were collectively known as the Knickerbockers) were the real power in New York high society.  The other mistake is the belief that the Old New Yorkers tried desperately to exclude the New Money people.  The high society of the Gilded Age loved ostentation and extravagant consumption far more than they cared who was picking up the check.

There are a few historical inaccuracies scattered around the show.  For many, the chief attraction to the show are the extravagant ball gowns of the ladies, but we have to overlook the fact that those gowns would not have had zippers—a device still a generation away.  Instead, gowns used intricate closures, often secured with small buttons, hooks and eyes, or lacings, all in such an inaccessible location that every woman had to have a ladies’ maid just to get dressed.  And that is not even counting the 30-40 additional buttons found on ladies’ formal ankle-length boots.

Not once in the show is a single elevated train visible, though these were already in use by 1882-–the time period represented in the show.  Though the show features a few horse-drawn streetcars, and plenty of horse-drawn cabs and carriages, the streets are far from the busy hectic traffic already common in New York.   The photo at left shows a New York street from 1890. 

There are other inaccuracies.  The show downplays racial tensions in the North, depicts none of the desperate poverty and dense overcrowding of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, and ignores the appalling lack of even basic sanitation for the majority of the city’s inhabitants.  I can forgive all this, since, if the show were truly accurate, no one would watch it.  If you want to know what the city was really like at the time, get hold of a copy of Jacob Riis’s excellent 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives.  

There is one historical inaccuracy that every historian who watches the show immediately comments on:  Why is there no horse manure on the streets?

The show takes place primarily in two houses that are located on opposite sides of street at the corner of 61st Street and 5th Avenue, very close to Central Park.  (This was the actual site of the Elbridge T. Gerry Mansion, built during the Gilded Age, but demolished in 1920.)  Several times during each episode, major characters cross the street, easily dodging the few horses and wagons proceeding down the pristine, dirt-paved street.

The reality, however, is that while most of the better neighborhoods in New York had just been connected to a sewage system in the 1880’s, there no drains in the dirt streets in even the best neighborhoods.  What did exist on those streets were thousands and thousands of work horses.  On any given day, there were an estimated 175,000 horses pulling wagons, cabs, and carriages through the crowded (and all too frequently, too narrow) streets.  

Not to be too indelicate, but the horses were neither trained to use a litter box nor were they wearing diapers—and they produced approximately four million pounds of horse manure every single day of the week.  Add to this a daily dose of 40,000 gallons of horse urine and the occasional rain, the contributions of an estimated 100,000 dogs… those muddy streets rarely dried out. And what wasn’t collected on any given day received a fresh layer the next day. When the streets did occasionally dry out, the drying manure turned to a thick dust that choked pedestrians, coated buildings, and infiltrated every home and business.

All of this made the streets—more accurately shown at left—all but impassable for pedestrians without the services of street-crossing sweepers. These sweepers were impoverished beggars who used a broom to clear a path across the muddy, manure-covered, (and otherwise filthy) streets in exchange for a small tip, usually a penny or two.  I doubt the television show will ever include them, however).

The city employed over two thousand people just to keep the streets clean, but this was  clearly inadequate.  

Seven or eight garbage scows carried the accumulated debris to Dead Horse Bay on Barren Island every day.  (As the name indicates, mixed into the garbage and offal the island received was an average of 36 dead horses every day.)

The sanitation workers could not clear the streets fast enough, so the collected manure was scraped and shoveled onto any available vacant lot, sometimes reaching heights of 40 to 60 feet before the city could arrange to cart it all off to Barren Island.  It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Barren Island eventually turned into a peninsula where the strangest things still occasionally wash ashore.

I won’t even attempt to describe the stench exuding from all of this!  Nor can I say much about the incredible number of flying insects that would descend upon (and FROM) a sixty-foot-high mountain of fresh manure.  These fly infestations were directly responsible for the deadly outbreaks of typhoid and “infant diarrheal diseases” that occurred frequently in the city.

I enjoy the Gilded Age.  I like reading the literature from Age.  And I’m damn glad I don’t live in that age.