Questions for Curatorial: Exhibit Design

How did the Museum design the privy shed that now appears in the reconstructed rear yard of 97 Orchard Street?

While the physical composition of 97 Orchard Street’s privies cannot be known with any certainty, archaeological research, reformers’ accounts, and available photos of similar facilities help paint a picture of their appearance. Based upon extant photographs taken of Lower East Side tenement rear yards during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 97 Orchard Street’s privy probably contained four compartments positioned in a row, roughly 2 feet 6 inches wide by 3 feet 9 inches deep, divided by wooden partitions. Indeed, the vault below measures approximately 9 feet long, suggesting that four stalls was the maximum number that could feasibly be sited over the sewer-connected privy.

Each compartment likely had door with a small ventilation hole and a possibly a lock. The floors, seats, and casing between the floors and seats in each compartment were also probably made of wood. While the typical length and width of tenement privy sheds were recorded by the reformers who wrote The Tenement House Problem, they failed to note the height of these structures.

In photos taken of tenement rear yards by the Tenement House Department between 1902 and 1904, the heights of privy sheds appear to have ranged between 6 and 8 feet. In many cases, the roof of the privy shed reached as high as the woodplank fence surrounding the yard, and both were often in line with the tops of the ground floor, rear facade windows of the tenement which they serviced.

In addition, these sheds exhibited ether peaked and flat roofs. Constructed using knotty pine, wooden privy sheds were truly vernacular structures whose size and shape was dictated both by the needs of the building owner and the prior experience of the carpenter who built them.

Below this structure, underground, sits a narrow, rectangular, mortared brick vault, 12 feet long and 4 1/2 feet wide, with some water at the bottom of the 9 foot long vault interior. Each compartment of the privy possibly had a funnel connecting the seat with the vault below, allowing waste to fall into the water-filled vault.

In addition, the brick vault had a drain on the east end, which connected to the sewer system. The drain might have been stopped with an iron cylindrical hollow plug, about 1 foot in height, and a bar and rod used to lift it out of the drain. There also may have been a pipe that was connected to the vault, which provided water from the Croton Aqueduct to periodically flush out the school sink privies.

"Modified Milk" and Lower East Side Dispensaries

When was the technology necessary to pasteurize milk made available in New York City?

Although New York City did not make pasteurizing milk mandatory until 1912, city residents had access to milk made safe by the technology almost two decades earlier. The doctor Henry Koplik's research in bacteriology led him to open a milk dispensary on the Lower East Side in 1889, probably the first in the nation. Philanthropist Nathan Strauss founded an early infant milk depot in 1893 on the East Third Street Pier. In response to high demand, subsequent depots were opened, including those in Tompkins Square Park and Seward Park on the Lower East Side.

According to a December 8, 1901 New York Times article (pdf), "a milk laboratory may be likened to a pharmacy where a supply of the finest drugs obtainable is kept on hand, to be combined in any variety or quantity as the prescriptions of physicians may demand." Sometimes milk was mashed with bread or jam, as "prescribed" by the doctor.

At the sterilization labs, milk was heated to 157 degrees Fahrenheit for twenty-five minutes and then rapidly cooled to 40 degrees. This process, Strauss’ doctors claimed, “kills all noxious germs and preserves the nutritious quality.”

The 1901 Times article mentions the costliness of this milk, "from $6 a month at the beginning" of a baby's life to close to $25 as he or she grew older and ate more. Dispensaries set up amongst the poor to provide medical care started offering this modified milk free or at a low cost. The Good Samaritan Dispensary at 75 Essex Street housed one such facility. Dubbed a "modified milk laboratory," it claimed to be "the first in the country to engage in the preparation of sterilized or modified milk for the children of the poor." (NYT, 5/12/1899)

Bringing milk to the children of the Lower East Side proved invaluable to their overall health, especially in the summertime, when food easily spoiled. An 1897 article describes this work as "an absolute necessity, and an incalculable boon to poor mothers who formerly were unable to procure safe food for children in hot weather."

The Good Samaritan Dispensary, formerly known as the Eastern Dispensary, was at the forefront of providing child health services to the working poor. Although Eastern Dispensary doctors had been working in the neighborhood since 1832, the operation received some much needed support in the 1880s, which seems to have led to its eventual name change.

Upon her death in 1882, a Miss Sarah Burr donated roughly $3 million dollars to various charities. In her will she earmarked $200,000 for "the founding and support of a dispensary in the City of New York, to be called 'The Good Samaritan Dispensary,' for the purpose of giving medical aid and advice to the indigent in the city of New York." (British Medical Journal, 4/29/1882).

Although nephews and nieces attempted to make this will null and void by reason of infirmary (apparently Miss Burr was a bit senile in her old age - in court testimony, witnesses stated she would often forget who they were or forget to pay them for services, and that her dress was "untidy"), in December, 1883, the judge ruled in favor of the various hospitals and charities, and the money was distributed according to the original will. In 1890, a cornerstone for a new building was laid near the site of the Eastern Dispensary (more on that building's history tomorrow).

The doctor Henry Koplik was instrumental in bringing safe milk to the neighborhood. Born in New York in 1859, Koplik was educated here and in Europe and in 1887 became Attending Physician at the new Good Samaritan Dispensary. He specialized in pediatric medicine and bacteriological research and went on to spend most of his career at Mt. Sinai Hospital. According to his 1927 obituary, "the fundamental subjects on hygiene and child welfare occupied much of his thought."

On January 1, 1912, a new ordinance went into effect requiring all milk sold in the city to be pasteurized and to be marked as such (as today, debates raged among the scientific communities, farmers, and doctors about the potential loss of nutrients from pasteurization - after 1906, it was illegal to sell pasteurized milk without it being so labeled, so that the consumer understood what they were purchasing). Death rates among children and infants dropped in the coming years, and no doubt more stringent regulations in the food production industry (along with improved technology and other sanitary reforms) helped to make this possible.

The clinic closed in 1955/56, and the building sat empty for a number of years. Tomorrow, more on the history of 75 Essex Street, including the history of Eisner Brothers, the business which has occupied the building since 1971.

(Top: June 22, 1897 New York Times article. Courtesy The New York Times Archive. Above: Dr. Koplik. Public Domain)

- Posted by Kate Stober, with thanks to Dave Favaloro

Friday Immigration News (plus Housing & Health)

Puerto Ricans in New York Face Persistent Struggles
(WNYC, November 20, 2009) Puerto Rican leaders have made lots of news this year – from Sonia Sotomayor’s rise to the Supreme Court, to the so-called ‘three amigos’ who took power in the New York legislature. While New York’s most visible Latino leaders are Puerto Rican…some researchers are trying to call attention to a less visible reality: that almost a third of Puerto Ricans are living below the poverty line, compared to less than a fifth of all New Yorkers. And in educational and professional achievement, New York’s Puerto Ricans are doing worse than Latinos as a whole. WNYC’s Marianne McCune reports.

U.S. DHS Head Insists Immigration Reform Is Key
(Carib World News, Nov. 20, 2009)
"The need for immigration reform is so clear," insists the US Homeland Security Chief, Janet Napolitano. In remarks this week to the Center for American Progress, Napolitano insisted that President Obama is committed to this issue and "the administration does not shy away from taking on the big challenges of the 21st century, challenges that have been ignored too long and hurt our families and businesses."

Exhibit documents immigrants’ stories
(The Galviston County Daily News, Nov. 20, 2009)
The traveling exhibit Forgotten Gateway chronicles the Port of Galveston, Texas’s largely forgotten history as a major gateway to American immigration from 1845 to 1924. Forgotten Gateway builds on a growing scholarly and public interest in the history of migration patterns to America and Galveston’s place as one of the nation’s top immigrant ports in that history.

Immigration Reform: The Phone Call Heard Around the Country
(New American Media, Nov. 19, 2009) Organizers described them as immigration reform "house parties." Across the country last night, in churches, schools, immigrant support centers and private homes, backers of immigration reform gathered around telephones (the speaker phone turning the device into a de-facto radio) as Hispanic U.S. legislators laid out the strategy for pushing a reform of the immigration system in 2010.

Fire Reveals Illegal Homes Hide in Plain Sight
(New York Times, Nov. 19, 2009)
For at least two years before a fire killed three men in an illegally divided house next door, Diane Ross and her family lived in an illegal apartment at 42-38 65th Street in Woodside, Queens. Their life there — in a basement divided into one apartment and four single-room units, with six others upstairs, all crammed into a two-family house — seemed to them to be business as usual, and attracted no special notice. Neither the tenants nor their landlord, who said he charged $107 a month for each room, tried to hide it.

Sir John Crofton, Pioneer in TB Cure, Dies at 97
(New York Times, Nov. 19, 2009)
Sir John Crofton, a pioneering clinician who demonstrated that antibiotics could be safely combined to cure tuberculosis, a dread disease that once killed half the people who contracted it, died on Nov. 3 at his home in Edinburgh. He was 97.

Facts and Findings - Scourges of the 19th Century

In their January/February issue Ancestry Magazine had a interesting piece on 19th century diseases. Although sickness can strike anyone, those living in overcrowded conditions, where disease can more easily spread, often bear the brunt:

In the crowded tenements in U.S. cities, poor sanitation helped disease thrive. The late 19th century saw epidemics of typhoid, typhus, smallpox, influenza, and bubonic plague, among others. A lack of understanding of the cause and means of prevention helped two epidemics—cholera and yellow fever—become particularly difficult and persistent.

Cholera reached the United States in the 1830s, as steamship travel and immigration increased. Public sentiment on the diseases, wrote historian Charles Rosenberg in The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866, was that cholera “was a scourge not of mankind but of the sinner” and that the disease would target people who engaged in what was considered morally reprehensible activity. “Most Americans did not doubt that cholera was a divine imposition,” said Rosenberg.

Read the full article...

The New York Historical Society recently had an exhibit on New York's cholera outbreaks, which shaped the city that we know today. Here's the New York Times review, and here's the NY Historical's blog on the exhibit, where among other things you can find an 1832 letter from printer William S. Bayley:

On Sunday (yesterday) the Park [City Hall Park] was black with persons anxiously waiting for the day’s report…. It [cholera] has been at No. 5 Walker Street, yesterday No. 9, and there was a case in our block in Church Street. The report to day shows five cases in Walker Street on the other or farther side of the Bowery. In a word, the disease is so completely spread that we were counting yesterday and could not recollect a street in which it had not been with the single exception of Park Place.

Of course, cholera is all too well known in the modern world. Last fall the disease struck more than 16,000 people and killed 780 in Zimbabwe, where clean drinking water is recently hard to come by and some sewer lines have burst. More at the Times.