This article entitled Urban Pollution- Many Long Years Ago is an intriguing reminder of humanities ongoing struggle with the pollution of their major cities. This article shows how humanities necessity to colonize and industrialize a particularly profitable location inevitably leads to contamination of this area. This article analyzes some of America's largest cities Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Milwaukee, and New York. It shows society's progression from the excessive use of the horse as a means of personal and commercial transportation; to the utilization of the automobile for these same purposes, and more, from 1850 to 1920's. This article identifies the fact that humanity may have solved the rampant spread of various diseases due to the presence of the workhorse. But they at the same time opened the doors for the automobile's pollutants to cause widespread respiratory ailments and lowered immune systems among citizens of all age ranges in areas that have a condensed population.
The fact that horses were mandatory for the transportation of people and commerce within the city meant that many allocations were necessary to maintain the cleanliness of the streets and protect against both the physical and auditory pollution they created. The physical pollution they created was their excrement and unremoved overworked corpses in the streets, and the noise pollution they created was with their hooves on the cobblestone and the vehicles they pulled. The author tells us that in, "In 1752 Boston selectmen allocated extra funds to clean the streets because of the fear that street dirt might contain smallpox infection, and in 1795, during the yellow-fever season, town officials invited neighboring farmers to collect the manure from the streets free of charge" (Tarr). As a result, city officials implemented the use of new forms of street cleaning. The author tells us that, "In 1855 New York introduced street-sweeping machines and self-loading carts, and in 1865 urban entrepreneurs formed the New York Sanitary and Chemical Compost Manufacturing Company for the purpose of ‘cleansing cities, towns, and villages in the United States' with several varieties of mechanical devices adapted to the task" (Tarr).
In addition to these efforts, city regulations were passed to prohibit horses on streets outside of significant city buildings so that public officials could better focus on their jobs. The article states, "In 1747, in Boston, the town council banned traffic from King Street so that the noise would not distract the deliberations of the General Court. In 1785 New York City passed an ordinance forbidding teams and wagons with iron-shod wheels from the streets" (Tarr). This quote gives evidence to the fact that horses were impeding the city's ability to run efficiently and that both citizens and city officials were ready to progress their cities past its reliability on workhorses in city streets.
Horses were the primary cause for many of the diseases in American cities. The article tells us that common diseases in the main cities were cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, or typhoid. He continues, “Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical authorities believed that such diseases were caused by "a combination of certain atmospheric conditions and putrefying filth," among which horse manure was a chief offender."(Tarr). In the mid-1700's American cities such as New York and Boston extended past only removing the waste to having the streets scoured clean. However, these efforts did not have long lasting enough results to be financially feasible for the cities to continue to pursue. In 1803 the New York City superintendent of scavengers turned a three-thousand-dollar profit recycling the horse dung. However, this was not enough to convince the city officials that this was a reasonable long-term fix for the ongoing problem.
Supporters of scientific progress begin to become more vocal in their desire to see society move away from their reliability on the horse altogether. Electric cable cars were one of the first attempts major cities made in response to the public's call for technological advancement from the baseness of relying on horses to progress. In this article Tarr quotes an American writer saying, "It is all a question of dollars and cents, this gasoline or oats proposition. The automobile is no longer classed as a luxury. It is acknowledged to be one of the great time-savers in the world" (Tarr). The evidence in the positive column of the pros vs. cons, the list, was accumulating quickly for the automobile over the horse to satisfy the public's needs in the future. Without any encouragement from the city's officials, the public latched onto the vehicle as a final answer to the struggles it had had to date with the horses.
Even if The Mayors could have foreseen the problems the automobile would also present, they could not have stopped society from viewing this revolutionary wonder as the solution to having horses in their cities. Now humanity can see the errors of their ways, however, just like in the past when humanity would only see the short term solution to horses, society will continue to rely on the automobile until a new short term solution presents itself. It is this writer's opinion that the problem was and is the condensed living conditions of America's central cities. More people must result in more horses or automobiles and consequently more waste or pollution. The obvious answer is that if the Nation's major hubs were more spread out the diseases that developed from the accumulation of equine excrement and overworked horse corpses in the streets would not have had as opportune a breeding ground as they did.
In conclusion, this article serves as a historical observation of the short-sightedness of early American Cities. And also how humanities need to colonize and industrialize particular profitable locations and call that place a City, will inevitably lead to that area's overpopulation and eventual pollution. Societies continuously posture that they are progressing and that they are evolving into more responsible planetary caretakers. However, it is not this article's purpose to show evidence of this. On the contrary, the text provides ample proof of society's willingness to pin their hopes of a better future on the next short-sighted solution. The obvious answer this article alludes to is that desaturation of populations in condensed areas and working towards well tested long-term solutions that will provide humanity with a healthier future than the solutions that humanity has relied on in its past.
Works Cited
Tarr, Joel A. "Urban Pollution-Many Long Years Ago | American History Lives At American Heritage". Americanheritage.com. N.p., 1971. Web. 18 June 2016.
