The History of Ash Heaps

New Yorkers are creatures of habit, when it comes to trash. To prove this, one need only leave a small pile of garbage out on some street corner. It will grow exponentially, all of a sudden a designated trash site.





The problem of what to do with what they throw away has bothered residents of the nation’s largest city almost since its inception. In the latest chapter, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suspended part of the city’s recycling effort, citing the lack of a profitable recycling market. He decreed that the Sanitation Department would no longer make separate pickups of plastic and glass. Instead, these items are again being mixed in with the bulk of the 928 pounds of garbage each resident throws away in a year.





The retreat from recycling is part of a long tug of war in which the city’s physical and fiscal health have often been balanced against each other.





Right from the beginning, the burghers of old New Amsterdam were embroiled in battles to keep residents from simply throwing their garbage and the contents of their chamber pots into the streets — where they counted on stray dogs, and especially the city’s many loose pigs, to eat them. By the 1800’s, the muck in Lower Manhattan was reportedly as much as two to three feet deep in the wintertime. When, in 1832, the city finally began a concerted effort to clean its streets, an old woman reportedly cried out in amazement, “Where in the world did all those [paving] stones come from? I never knew that the streets were covered with stones before.”





Even then, trash collection was sporadic, and during the Civil War draft riots, striking sanitation workers smashed the new street-cleaning machines (essentially water barrels on wheels), yelling, “Death to the labor-saving devices!” Landlords illegally hooked their cesspools and outhouses up to the city’s terribly inadequate sewers. During the worst of the summer heat, dead horses routinely decayed in the streets.





Sanitation lagged even as the consequences of its neglect became increasingly evident. Waves of cholera and typhus swept through the city, carrying off rich and poor alike. The Collect, a large, beautiful pond that was a favorite Manhattan gathering place throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, became so polluted with the refuse from butchers’ and tanners’ shops that by 1813 it had been finally filled in. From this fetid, slowly sinking soil rose the notorious Five Points slum. There, the mortality rate for children under 5 reached 50 percent.





Forms of recycling did exist throughout much of the 19th century. The city routinely handed over much of its trash to rag-and-bone pickers, some of whom used it to make dolls that were sold at Macy’s and other department stores.





In 1896, a new sanitation commissioner, George E. Waring Jr., reorganized the department and instituted a more systemized plan. For the first time, New Yorkers were required to separate their garbage at curbside. Much of it was sold to private contractors, who boiled it down for grease and fertilizer, or used it for landfill and other purposes.





BUT by the 1920’s, this earlier recycling effort had also been defeated by a falling market in trash. The city had some 80 open dumps, including the monumental ash heap in Flushing Meadows that F. Scott Fitzgerald described memorably in “The Great Gatsby” — “a fantastic farm, where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.”





Garbage lined much of the Manhattan waterfront along the Lower East Side. From there, it was transported to one of New York’s 22 incinerators or — until the practice was banned by the United States Supreme Court in 1934 — towed out and dumped into the sea. The sea often threw it back onto local beaches, along with the city’s untreated sewage. By 1940, according to a recent study by Daniel C. Walsh, a research scientist at the