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Journal of Urban History37(5) 639 660
2011 SAGE PublicationsReprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0096144211407561http://juh.sagepub.com
Articles
407561 JUH37510.1177/0096144211407561McNeurJournal of Urban
History
1Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Corresponding Author:Catherine McNeur, Department of History,
Yale University, P.O. Box 208324, New Haven, CT 06520-8324 Email:
[email protected]
The Swinish Multitude: Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New
York City
Catherine McNeur1
Abstract
In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Yorkers fought
passionately over the presence of hogs on their streets and in
their city. New Yorks filthy streets had cultivated an informal
economy and a fertile environment for roaming creatures. The
battlesboth physical and legalreveal a city rife with class
tensions. After decades of arguments, riots, and petitions, cholera
and the fear of other public health crises ultimately spelled the
end for New Yorks hogs. New York struggled during this period to
improve municipal services while adapting to a changing economy and
rapid population growth. The fights between those for and against
hogs shaped New York Citys landscape and resulted in new rules for
using public space a new place for nature in the city.
Keywords
environmental history, public space, social conflict, animals,
New York City
On Tuesday, April 5, 1825 two hog catchers entered the Eighth
Ward of New York City. For the first time in four years,
free-roaming pigs were illegal in this northern neighborhood where
their owners riots had previously kept the hog law at bay.1
Conscious that disgruntled hog owners might resist their efforts,
the citys aldermen prepared accordingly. Four officers, including
Marshall Abner Curtis, who had weathered riots alongside dog
catchers in the 1810s, accompa-nied the hog catchers.2 By the time
the six men reached the upper end of Hudson Street, near Vandam,
their cart teemed with squealing swinish captives. Angry men and
women had gathered around thema crowd the newspapers referred to as
a large mob of disorderly people. With their demands for the return
of the livestock unmet, the protestors got violent. Henry Bourdenan
Irish laborer who lived in the Eighth Ward with his wife, four
children, and likely several pigsgrabbed a four-pound weight,
perhaps a brick, and hurled it at the officers. He hit Abner Curtis
in the face, knocking him down onto the street. After the crowd had
overtaken the hog catchers and officers, they broke open the back
of the wooden cart and let loose all of the hogs, who quickly
scampered off in different directions.3
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640 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
The Eighth Ward was changing. Wealthier residents had moved in
and they demanded cleaner streets free of swine foraging among the
heaps of garbage. The northwestern suburbs of Manhattan (todays
Greenwich Village, West Village, and Tribeca) became especially
attractive to downtown residents during the Yellow Fever outbreak
of 1822 after the city cordoned off the denser neighborhoods on the
southern tip of the island. Even after the restrictions were
lifted, many decided to stay and make the Eighth Ward their
permanent home.
The working-class hog owners, who had lived in the area for
years, felt that interlopers were attacking their neighborhood and
way of life. These Irish and African American laborers were barely
scraping by, and their livestock were an important source of both
income and food. Yet this was of little interest to those who did
not own hogs and considered them a nuisance. A month before the hog
riot, some of these wealthier residents rallied together and
petitioned the Common Council to extend the boundaries of the hog
law to include their ward. They planned to polish up their streets,
and that involved getting rid of the pigs that blocked their
sidewalks. The aldermen eagerly obliged.4
The 1825 hog riot that resulted was part of a larger string of
physical and legal battles that helped to shape the landscape of
New York.5 The issue of free-roaming swine was divisive, and the
battles that ensued exposed a city rife with class tensions.
Anti-hogites, or those against the presence of loose hogs,
contended that the animals impeded the progress, refinement, and
moder-nity of New York. Pro-hogites, however, believed citizens had
the right to utilize public spaces as necessary in order to
subsist.6 As New Yorks population swelled during the nineteenth
cen-tury, these conflicting ideas of how public space ought to be
used led to increasingly desperate battles over whose vision should
reign supreme.
Scholars have typically portrayed cities as social artifacts, in
opposition to their rural or natu-ral surroundings. Lewis Mumford,
for instance, wistfully wrote that nature, except in a surviv-ing
landscape park, is scarcely to be found near the metropolis.7
Cities, however, are hybrid spaces where human occupants have
hardly conquered their environment, let alone separated themselves
from it. By examining the ways people fought over the urban
environment, historians can get an even fuller sense of the social
dynamics that shaped cities. Attempts to remove New Yorks hogs led
to fierce debates and violent encounters about the citys character
and the rules governing its space. The politically contentious
battles that ensued demonstrate how changes to public space can
have an extensive economic and environmental impact while also
redefining what it means to be urban.8
New Yorkers had been arguing about hogs for centuries. In 1640,
the Dutch West India Company complained that they had suffered
great injury of cultivation and serious damage to their holdings at
the hands (or hooves) of hogs and goats. A decade later, a
desperate Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Amsterdam,
threatened to shoot down any hog found rooting near the fort. The
English who succeeded the Dutch also found it difficult to deal
with roaming swine and struggled to enforce impoundment laws and
organize government-regulated hunting of loose hogs on the
streets.9
Hogs became an even bigger problem after the American
Revolution. Following the war, the citys population boomed as
people moved in from the countryside and overseas. Hogs sub-sisted,
for the most part, on the garbage that New Yorkers placed on the
sidewalks and streets outside of their homes and businesses. As the
human population grew and garbage piled higher, the hog population
thrived. One 1820 estimate suggested that there were twenty
thousand hogs in the settled parts of Manhattan, or approximately
one hog for every five humans in the city.10
By the 1810s, the controversy over hogs had become a hot topic
for New Yorkers, revealing friction between wealthier and poorer
neighbors. While hogs had been owned by residents of all classes in
colonial New York, in the early nineteenth century they were
typically the property of
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McNeur 641
poorer city residents. Wealthy and middle-class New Yorkers had
been able to abandon gardening and raising livestock in exchange
for purchasing their food with cash at their local markets. Poorer
New Yorkers with smaller wages had a harder time making that
transition.11 In consequence, as these issues with swine
intensified, they began to reflect growing class tensions in the
city.
Hogs role as livestock did not help their situation. They were
not coddled or praised as pets such as dogs were. While certainly
some of their owners bonded with them, their potential to be eaten
or sold probably helped to limit the depth of that bond. Potential
bourgeois allies were less likely to sympathize with the plight of
the urban hog as they might with other animal wanderers like cats
and dogs, since they did not have similar creatures at home to
compare. With farms getting pushed further and further from the
citys center, hogs increasingly seemed to anti-hogites like an
unwelcome presence in what should have been a human-centered
environment. At best they were seen as a food source, at worst as
stubborn, filthy impediments on streets and sidewalks.
In their anonymous letters to newspapers, anti-hogites of the
1810s and 1820s routinely drew parallels between the pigs and their
owners, using Edmund Burkes phrase the swinish multi-tude to
describe both populations.12 For these authors, New Yorks urban
hogs were as much of an Other as the Irish immigrants and African
Americans who owned them. Pigs association with the citys lower
classes led to many vicious, tongue-in-cheek poems and letters by
critics who saw the animals and their owners as interchangeable.13
When an author described a hog as the filthiest part of the brutes,
his disdain for the citys poor shined through.14 Hogs, long
con-sidered to be among the lowliest of farm animals because of
their ravenous, greedy behavior, were ripe for insults. While
wealthier New Yorkers were perhaps hesitant to insult their poorer
neighbors directly, insulting their animals provided an outlet for
airing class tensions. Through these comparisons, whether drawn in
humor or anger, anti-hogite writers emphasized the ridicu-lousness
of allowing outsidersbase pigs and their similarly base ownersto
run their city.
Yet when Europeans visited the city, their criticism of the
roaming hogs condemned all New Yorkers, not just the poor who owned
them. When Charles Henry Wilson visited from England in 1819, he
found the city to be miserably dirty with innumerable hungry pigs
of all sizes and complexions, great and small beasts prowling in
grunting ferocity, and in themselves so great a nuisance, that
would arouse the indignation of any but Americans.15 Worried about
such reactions, anti-hogites pleaded with the Council to refine the
city. Discussing a vacant lot of land filled with house rubbish,
swine, cattle, and beggars, a neighbor appealed to the city to
clean it up: [the Common Councils] interference becomes doubly
urgent, in this instance, from the consideration, that the nuisance
above mentioned exists in the section of town which is most
frequented by our citizens, and by strangers who visit New York.16
The citys image was at stake (see Figure 1). The New York anti-pig
constituency frequently referred to the city as being disgraced by
the presence of the animals. These residents were concerned about
the influence of swine on the identity of their city.17 To visitors
and local anti-hogites alike, the hogs symbol-ized all that was
backwards in New York. They represented the city governments
inability to exact change and promote the progress of the city.
When the anti-hogites complained about hogs, they were also in many
ways complaining about the undesirable classes living in their city
that imposed on their public space and municipal government.18
The hog owners, however, saw these issues more in terms of
survival than in terms of moder-nity or progress. Whereas in the
eighteenth century laborers lived and ate in the homes of master
craftsmen, with the growth of wage labor most of these men had to
find separate housing and pay rent.19 Food was rarely cheap and as
the decades went on prices became less predictable.20 Jobs for day
laborers were hardly stable, often seasonal, and completely
dependent on weather and economic conditions. Municipal welfare
programs, while helpful in assisting some of the poor with food and
fuel, could not keep up with New Yorks ballooning population in the
early nineteenth
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642 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
century.21 During periods of economic crisis, such as after the
War of 1812, alternative sources of income and food were especially
crucial.
New Yorks laboring poor used hogs as a cheap and efficient way
to make ends meet. When the hog owners argued for the right to keep
their livestock, they insisted that hogs allowed the poor to pay
their rents and supply their families with animal food, during the
winter. By selling a pig or two, they were able to procure some
other articles necessary for their comfort and con-venience. They
pleaded that without their livestock, they would be forced to rely
on the charity of the city and become a public burden.22
Hogs could be left to take care of themselves on the street,
finding free food in the gutters of the city. The streets
essentially served as an urban commons. While New York, unlike
Boston, lacked an official commons, its residents and their animals
had created a de facto substitute. Refuse mainly consisted of
food-based items, such as offal and kitchen scraps, so the hogs
could essentially find their entire days diet within a few blocks
of their residence. These urban forag-ers, who could be summoned by
name, would apparently wander home at night to sleep in their
owners backyards or near the front stoop.23
The pro-hogites argued in petitions to the city that swine
played an important role in cleaning the streets of garbage. Since
the city did not have the resources to supply enough street
sweepers to collect trash, hog owners contended that sanitation and
public health problems actually would worsen without swine to keep
them under control. Pigs were our best scavengers, as they
instantly devour all fish guts, garbage, and offal of every kind,
which is suffered to remain during the summer months, [and] would
be very offensive and might very probably be injurious to the
health of the inhabitants. Garbage collecting in the poorer
neighborhoods was irregular at best, and allowing hogs to forage
was one method for removing trash and preserving the health of the
most vulnerable residents.24
Figure 1. In this image by a nineteenth-century tourist, hogs
are depicted intermingling with pedestrians and traffic on Broadway
in plain sight of City Hall.Brodway-Gatan Och Rdhuset i New York,
1824. Aquatint by Carl Fredrik Akrell based on etching by Axel
Klinckow-strm (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
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McNeur 643
The anti-hogites countered that the municipal government ought
to fund and regulate street cleaning more effectively, creating
jobs for people, not swine. Many anti-hogites believed that taking
care of the streets would solve multiple problems. In 1809, a
friend to order and improve-ment wrote to the Republican
Watch-Tower pleading with the city to get rid of the trash so that
the hogs would disappear.25 If the city would just clean the
streets, the hogs would have less to subsist on and the owners
would essentially be forced to take them off the street and either
give up the hog business or find alternative food sources for their
creatures. Critics tied the existence of hogs to a chaotic city
where neither the government nor the citizens had control of the
situa-tion. With the growth in urbanization during this period,
many residents hoped the city would evolve into a more organized,
manageable environment. If progress for anti-hogites meant the
municipal government maintaining control over its nuisances, pigs
stubbornly grunted in resistance.26
Hogs also disrupted city life by making the roads unfit for
driving over in wagons and carts due to their constant rooting.
They used their snouts to dig up cobblestones and other materials
used for pavements, often causing traffic disruptions and
accidents, not to mention muddy holes for pedestrians to dodge. In
1812 the Common Council noted that pigs were tearing apart a
side-walk near the Battery, one of the more prestigious residential
neighborhoods at the time and a popular tourist destination: Every
description of filth is there deposited & the swine by rooting
up the ground & wallowing there in the mire, make the passage
to the Battery from Broadway not only very unsightly but very
offensive.27 As the city became more populous, the number of
problems and severity of the accidents only increased. Horses would
either get scared by or stumble over pigs loitering in the streets,
causing their carriages to tip over, often injuring pas-sengers and
bystanders.28
Anti-hogites also complained about the danger hogs posed to
public health. Swine were closely tied to the filth and unpleasant
smells that characterized the streets and public places of the
city. Hogs and garbage, after all, went hand in hand. The
nineteenth-century medical com-munity generally believed that the
offensive smell of the animals, their exhalations, and their
environs aided epidemics. After each outbreak of yellow fever and
cholera, complaints about hogs increased in number in both
newspaper articles and letters to the government. New Yorkers even
blamed mundane aches and illnesses on the hogs. It was not uncommon
for those suffering from headaches and nausea to accuse their
neighbors fondness for swine.29
Anti-hogites saw the threat of these urban hogs to be even
greater because they could turn up on their dinner plates. Ham and
pork, as well as other porcine products, were staples in the diets
of Americansrich and poorin the early nineteenth century. Unlike
cows or goats, hogs required little attention from their owners.
Butchers and consumers could easily preserve pork through salting
and smoking, which was an enormous advantage since refrigeration
was both difficult and expensive. Not only were hog owners able to
eat their street hogs, they could also sell them to the butchers of
the city. Anti-hogites often complained of the potential dangers of
eating these walking sewers that regularly consumed the offal and
refuse left on the streets.30 One writer for The Evening Post
claimed that
when they become diseased, from high feeding on dead cats and
the vermin in the gutters, or any other cause, they soon find their
way to our butchers stalls. Knowing this may be the case, if in
fact it is not, many people of my acquaintance whose stomachs are
rather squeamish, would as soon taste a broiled rat as the finest
looking griskin or roaster that can be brought to the table.31
For health reasons, many New Yorkers who had the choice
preferred to eat the pricier, country-raised hogs from Long Island
and New Jersey.
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644 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
Anti-hogites found that one of the most effective ways to enrage
votersmore effective per-haps than complaining of objectionable
meatwas to expose the danger hogs posed to women and girls, a
tactic that started to appear in the newspapers in 1815. While boys
mischievously rode hogs down the streets and men caned hogs to get
them to move, women and girls were more often attacked by the
creatures.32 One observer witnessed a bristly invader, in his
precipitate retreat across the pavement, upset a lady in full dress
for a party, and landed her broad-side in the filth of the gutter!
The result was, no bones were broken; but her dress so soiled as to
require an entire change.33 The roles of women and girls remained
almost constant in the anecdotes used by those pleading for the
removal of the swine. Women were thrown off their feet into mud
puddles and little girls lives were threatened by angry sows.
Through tales that were likely exag-gerated for dramatic effect,
authors invited the men of the city and specifically the aldermen
to be valiant heroes and make the city safe for genteel
women-folk.
Yet pro-hogites would perhaps argue that the women in these
stories represented only a spe-cific population of the city. Many
working-class women owned and cared for the hogs that were villains
of these tales. The hogs contributed to their household economy and
female members of the family were likely those who tended the swine
when necessary. These women were also actively involved in
protesting the laws and rioting when necessary. While anti-hogites
might argue that all women were threatened by the quadrupeds, they
were not accounting for those who relied on them.34
These arguments between anti-hogites and pro-hogites had fully
matured by the mid-1810s when the hogs had become so numerous that
their presence could no longer be ignored. Following the War of
1812, the city fell into an economic slump. Facing unemployment or
underemployment, many of the poorest New Yorkers scraped by using
alternative means of subsistence and income. At the same time, the
citys population was growing rapidly and stylish neighborhoods were
pushing into the outskirts of town where these working-class New
Yorkers lived. This clashing of neighborhoods and classes, along
with the rising number of hogs, brought the conflict to a boiling
point.35
In November 1816, Abijah Hammond, one of New Yorks wealthiest
landowners and mer-chants, rallied a group of approximately two
hundred anti-hogites and submitted a petition to the Common Council
calling for the removal of all free-roaming swine from the
streets.36 The Council considered drafting a law but postponed
voting on it twice: the first time because it would oblige the poor
owners to kill off their herds before the usual butchering season
in the fall; the second because it would jeopardize their own
political careers if discussed before the April elections. That
May, however, the Council returned to the issue and resolved to
finally be done with pigs.37 Hog owners got word of the Councils
intentions and united quickly under the leadership of Adam
Marshall, an African American chimney sweep. In merely two days,
they drew up a petition containing eighty-seven signatures and
marks of both men and women, which pled with the city to pity the
poor and allow the hogs to remain, as they were a necessary
resource for the destitute.38 The Evening Post reported that the
petitioners read the remonstrance in such a dramatic fashion that
the aldermen felt the need to adjourn for a week.39
Hearing about this display, the anti-hogites belittled the
pro-hogite efforts in the newspapers. One author mocked the
petition as being signed, or at least marked by the principal
master chimney sweeps, who generally keep droves of hogs for our
amusement.40 By mentioning the chimney sweeps, this writer intended
to tell readers that Marshall and the other petitioners were
African American, as chimney sweeping was commonly known to be an
African American occupation. Pro-hogites, however, were mainly
united by their economic status as unemployed or unskilled
laborers, rather than by their race. Hog owners were typically
recent Irish or English immigrants, as well as African Americans.
The authors invocation of chimney sweeps, how-ever, helped to
emphasize the outsider status of pro-hogites. Prior to the 1821
revision of the
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McNeur 645
New York State constitution, African Americans had the same
voting rights as all New Yorkers. It was typical to find men such
as Adam Marshall actively involved in petitioning the Common
Council to protect their and other working-class New Yorkers
interests.41 Yet, in the eyes of anti-hogites, Marshall and the
other hog owners had little right to influence the aldermen and, in
doing so, dictate how public space should be used.
When the Council reconvened on May 27 and avoided the
contentious hog law topic, the anti-hogites used humor to criticize
what they saw as the impotence of the government. One writer
remarked that in battling the government, the hogs and, by
implication, their owners had kept their ground, grunting a sturdy
defiance.42 The pro-hogites seemed to have the Common Councils
ear.
The aldermen waited for the dust to settle before they debated
the proposed law a month later. The document stipulated that hogs
running at large would be impounded and their owners would pay ten
dollars plus costs to recover their property. This was an
exceptionally steep fine considering the average artisan earned
approximately one dollar per day.43 The law was defeated by four
votes only to be considered again that October at the behest of
countless anti-hogite constituents. This time the Council passed
the ordinance the same day it was proposed, leaving the pro-hogites
with no time to assemble and draw up another petition. The aldermen
scheduled the law to take effect January 1, 1818. In the meanwhile
the anti-hogites celebrated their long-awaited success.44
The pro-hogites, however, fretted about the implications of this
new law. Adam Marshall again rallied his hog-owning compatriots to
sign a petition calling for the city to repeal the law, but they
were less than successful.45 Once more, the anti-hogite press
ridiculed the efforts of a black man and chimney sweep to challenge
common decency.46 But Marshall was not deterred and tried again on
behalf of the pro-hogites, presenting a third petition to the
Common Council just a month after the law had taken effect. This
document was much more substantial than the petitions they had
presented before, containing 140 signatures of only white men, and
rolling out to be nearly five feet long. Marshall, though African
American himself, likely felt he could be more effective and avoid
the predictable ridicule of the press by excluding African
Americans and women from the list. The petitioners also responded
to the criticism in the news-papers by including only signatures
and no marks, which had earlier indicated the illiteracy of some of
their supporters. Addressing the especially unfair nature of the
law that allowed private individuals to take pigs off the streets
in exchange for a reward, the petitioners claimed that Unjust and
rapacious men have prowled through several parts of the upper
wards, and under colour of this Law seized on the property of the
poor, and even appropriated it to their own uses. The city had
essentially let loose a swarm of informers upon the defenseless
poor.47 After this petition and another were read before the
Council, the persuaded aldermen repealed the law.48
Anti-hogites responded in kind, mourning the repeal and calling
on voters to oust the alder-men at the next election. One poet,
angered by the repeal, mused that the rulers of the city were
four-legged. He wrote,
But now the hogs,Those grunting dogs,Have made their sway
complete;A voice they haveIn Council grave,And rule in evry
street.49
Anti-hogites returned to publishing satirical and humorous
pieces in the newspapers ridiculing the governments friendliness
toward swine while pleading with the city to reissue a strict
hog
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646 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
law. The author of the poem again equated the pro-hogites with
their livestock, bemoaning the power the poor had in influencing
the city government.
Frustrated by the nonpartisan nature of the debates, one critic
suggested designating the ticket for aldermen and assistants that
contains the names of such as are in favor of the hogs as The Hog
Ticket at the upcoming municipal election.50 There were certainly
more Republican aldermen voting for the repeal of the hog law than
Federalists, but the division was more geo-graphic than political.
Aldermen and assistant aldermen from the outer wards typically
voted pro-hogite. Representing wards with lower land values, these
aldermen counted many hog own-ers among their constituents. In the
post-war economy with limited municipal resources for welfare and
many constituents struggling, taking away their wards hogs would
have probably caused more immediate problems than it would have
solved.51
While the aldermen attempted to balance the needs of the citys
destitute with the demands of the increasingly vocal anti-hogite
faction, Mayor Cadwallader D. Colden considered himself above the
fray. Unlike the aldermen, Colden was appointed by the governor
rather than elected and therefore not subject to the political
pressure of constituents. Descended from an elite New York family,
Colden was solidly anti-hog. In 1818, soon after he took office,
Colden decided to use his position as judge of the Court of General
Sessions to subvert the Common Councils stalemate by calling a
grand jury to hear evidence on urban pig-keeping. The jury returned
an indictment charging two artisans for the nuisance of keeping
hogs on the street.52 One defendant offered no defense and was
quickly convicted and charged a nominal fee, but the other,
Christian Harriet, declared his innocence and hired lawyers,
thereby sending the case to trial.
Mayor Colden hoped The People vs. Christian Harriet would be the
legal end for the citys roaming pigs. Harriets lawyers, however,
claimed that he had the right to keep pigs in the streets, as it
was a practice of immemorial duration and our ancestors had never
been troubled with any excessive notions of delicacy on the
subject. The attorneys pled with the jury to recog-nize the
importance of the pigs, as their exile would cause the poor to be
driven deeper into poverty. They argued the case should be
dismissed as the Council had repealed the law earlier that year.
Mr. Van Wyck, the prosecutor, and Mayor Colden, the judge, argued
that despite the absence of a municipal law, the city was still
held to English common law precedents against nuisances. Hogs,
regardless of their benefit to the poor, qualified as a nuisance,
which Colden defined as an offence against the public order and
economical regimen of the state, and an annoyance to the public.
Apparently Coldens public did not include the hog owners who
depended so dearly on these animals. By declaring loose hogs to be
a nuisance, Colden was unleashing the authority of the city to
limit the hog owners property rights. Nuisance law was one of the
primary ways nineteenth-century cities exerted control over private
property in order to protect public welfare, however that might be
defined.53 Responding to the defenses claim that barring pigs from
the streets would injure the poor, the mayor declared, Why,
gentlemen! Must we feed the poor at the expense of human flesh? He
played on the fears that loose hogs were not only a nuisance but
also a threat to the welfare of the citys women and children. With
the mayors urging, the jury found Harriet guilty.54
The People vs. Christian Harriet set a precedent that was
followed for at least two years after the case. Instead of
struggling to pass laws against all pig owners in general, the
prosecutors focused on indicting random, individual offenders for
their negligence.55 The anti-hogites praised the efforts of the
courts in newspaper articles and hoped that the cases would have a
significant impact.56 The mayor had used his position as judge to
circumvent the Common Councils dead-lock. As one newspaper put it,
we must look to our courts for the remedy; it is considered too
unpopular for the corporation to meddle with it.57 Mayor Colden
found this to be the easiest way to avoid dealing with petitioners
and voters who did not support his vision for a pig-free city.
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McNeur 647
After three years, it had become apparent that the hog owners
had not been frightened into compliance by the threat of
indictment. In 1821 a new mayor, Stephen Allen, took office, ready
to tackle the hog problem. Realizing that Coldens tactic had been
unsuccessful, Allen brought the issue back before the Common
Council. The Council then passed a law that required all pigs
collected on the street be brought to the Almshouse where they
would be served for dinner.58 Though the law was officially on the
books, little was done to actually enforce it. A few anti-hogites
wrote to the newspapers a month later pleading with the city to
take action, claiming that unless [the aldermen] wish to make fools
of themselves and expose themselves to the contempt and ridicule of
the public, they will cause all their laws to be strictly
enforced.59 Determined to make the ordinance effective, the Common
Council resolved that it be carried into full opera-tion against
the offenders.60
A mere four weeks later, the Council once again ran into
problems. The Almshouse Commissioners announced that they had tried
to collect the hogs, but the hog catchers had been violently
resisted by the owners.61 Mayor Allen called the collectors
together a few weeks later and threatened that they either execute
the law or forfeit their licenses. When the African American hog
catchers resumed their tasks later that week, they were immediately
resisted by hundreds of hog owners. Locals assaulted the hog
catchers with mud, rotten food, hot water, and broomsticks. A riot
had begun.62 The rioters were a diverse group of women and men,
mainly made up of working-class Irish and African Americans. One of
the possible reasons hog owners resorted to violence was perhaps
because a large number of themnamely, the African Americanshad lost
the ability to use more customary means of political protest, such
as petitioning, with the restriction of their suffrage under the
1821 New York State constitution.63 In response to the riot, the
Council limited the hog law so that it excluded the outer wards
where resistance was particularly strong.
Anti-hogites belittled the riot as a feeble attempt to oppose
the execution of this salutary ordinance.64 Feeble or not, the hog
owners were successful. By April 1822, the papers noted that the
Common Council indulged the hog owners who openly disregarded the
ordinance, and set it at defiance.65 The editors of the Evening
Post complained that pigs were still found tram-pling through piles
of garbage on the streets a year later in 1823, notwithstanding the
prohibi-tions against them.66 The law was as good as dead.
When the city tried to reinvigorate its efforts to collect hogs
in 1825, the resistance of the pro-hogites remained strong. The hog
catchers were so effectively blocked in the Eighth Ward by Henry
Bourden and his neighbors that the law was again considered
obsolete.67 Thomas F. DeVoe, a butcher, wrote that he had witnessed
many scrimmages that year where the negro hog-catchers, and also
the officers who attended them, were either cheated out of their
prey, or obliged entirely to desist, . . . [and] almost every
woman, to a man, was joined together for com-mon protection in
resisting their favorites from becoming public property.68
Additional riots occurred in 1826, 1830, and 1832 following the
same pattern with several hundred people emerg-ing each time to
block the passage of the hogcart by whatever means necessary. While
the anti-hogites continued to complain about the citys inability to
implement the laws, the pig owners had successfully impeded the
city from enforcing them.69
And then in 1832 cholera struck. The city tried to prevent its
spread by cleaning up public spaces and minimizing nuisances. In
fact, it was just that zeal to purify the streets that led to a
sweep through the city to remove hogs in 1832 and a subsequent hog
riot, which was hardly noticed by the newspapers amid all of the
panic over the disease. Fear of the epidemics return continued to
inspire attention to street sanitation during the summers of the
1830s and 1840s, and the roaming hog population slowly began to
diminish.70 Tourists would still mock the conditions of the
streets, but anti-hogites stopped complaining as loudly and
frequently in the newspapers and government proceedings.71 The pigs
were beginning to make an exit.
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648 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
It would not be until 1849 that the streets in the developed
areas of Manhattan would officially be hog-free. After the start of
the cholera epidemic that year, the police, empowered by the Board
of Healths Sanitory [sic] Committee, went on a campaign to flush
the grunting swine out of the densest parts of the city. The
captains of the police districts were instructed to remove all hogs
to the public pound with twenty-four hours notice.72 Just four
years earlier, New York had estab-lished its first full-time
professional police force. These men were, to an extent,
responsible for dealing with neighborhood nuisances. In the citys
past attempts to eliminate its swinish resi-dents, the mayor and
aldermen passed responsibility on to departments and institutions,
such as the Almshouse, that lacked the ability to successfully
enforce the law. The professional police force made all the
difference. Though the owners would not let go of their pigs
without a fight, the professional police were immediately more
effective. After decades of difficulty, the city finally had the
ability to enforce the hog law.
The cholera outbreaks had ultimately sealed the free-roaming
hogs fate. By June the police had moved between five and six
thousand swine into the northern part of the island. Cholera seemed
to follow the swine, striking residents of the more rural wards
later that summer. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune,
who had recently lost his son to cholera, erroneously blamed the
epidemic on the arrival uptown of twenty thousand hogs.73 The first
case of cholera that year occurred at 20 Orange Street in the midst
of Five Points, a blighted neighborhood where many of the residents
owned swine. A building just two doors down from the tenement had a
remarkable 106 hogs. The people who first got cholera even had a
spoiled ham set out on their makeshift table.74 While contaminated
water was at the root of the epidemic, health officials targeted
the sanitation issues of the city more generally, including the
street-wandering swine.75
The city had become so dense and its municipal serviceswhether
water, sanitation, or sup-port for the poorso lacking that
epidemics such as cholera could thrive and affect large por-tions
of the population. For several decades anti-hogites had been
crafting arguments to convince the municipal government to take
action and eliminate hogs from the streets, but in the end a public
health crisis was actually what made the difference. Too many lives
were at risk and though we now know that the pigs had little to do
with the outbreak, it seemed very possible to the terrified city
dwellers that they were in part to blame. In the hysteria that
followed, the laws finally stuck. Municipal officers and police
attacked the general sanitation problems in full force. While in
the end they were only able to address a fraction of the public
health issues facing the city, they did succeed in clearing New
Yorks streets of free-roaming hogs.
The fight was far from over, however. In the 1840s, anti-hogites
began voicing complaints about the growing number of piggeries, or
property with penned hogs, in the upper reaches of the city.76
These establishments existed mainly between 50th and 70th Streets
in the center of the islanda rocky area that locals often referred
to as Hogtown or Pigtown. The piggery own-ers likely sold their
hogs to the large-scale slaughterhouses that were built just to
their south in the 40s, as well as to local butchers. These butcher
shops served their surrounding communities and were an important
source of cheap meat in poorer neighborhoods that were miles away
from the public markets.77
Piggeries were owned primarily by Irish immigrants, though
Germans and the occasional African American tried their hand at the
business as well. While most owners of free-roaming hogs in decades
past used the animals to supplement their income, piggery owners
made hog fattening and selling their primary trade. There were
other ways to make money in this industry too. The piggery owners
collected or paid scavengers to collect offal, bones, and swill
from slaughterhouses, hotel restaurants, and the streets. They took
these materials that were otherwise considered trash and boiled
them in caldrons on their property. They then sold the fat to
tallow chandlers and soap makers and the bones to sugar refiners,
and fed the remaining slop to their hogs. The smells that rose from
the offal- and bone-boiling cauldrons, more than anything else,
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McNeur 649
enraged the senses of downtown New Yorkers traveling through the
northern reaches of the city.78
The land purchased for the creation of Central Park included
many of these piggeries. When Frederick Law Olmsted took his first
tour of the park in 1857, he complained that the low grounds were
steeped in [the] overflow and mash of pig sties, slaughterhouses
and bone boiling works and the stench was sickening.79 Most of the
complaints lodged against the piggeries had to do with the
extensive smells the area produced, scattering the seeds of disease
and death. With the development of Central Park came a rush of real
estate investors interested in profiting from these once marginal
lands. Once again, the swine and their odors would have to
go.80
The social status and ethnicity of the piggery owners were not
lost on their critics. A writer from the New York Times described
the neighborhood as a group of shanties in which the pigs and the
Patricks lie down together while little ones of Celtic and swinish
origin lie miscella-neously, with billy-goats here and there
interspersed.81 The closeness of the animals and their owners
emphasized the perceived depravity and savageness of the area and
its residents. Descriptions such as these only helped to fuel
Nativist resentment of the Irish in New York. Critics and reformers
believed the piggeries were inappropriate in an increasingly
refined city and their odoriferous threat to public health should
have sealed their fate.
Political stalemates led to the continued presence of piggeries
in the upper wards. By the 1850s the pro-hogite and anti-hogite
constituencies had shifted. Pro-hogites, or piggery owners, were
still made up of poorer Irish immigrants, but there were fewer
African Americans and more Germans than earlier in the century. In
the Common Council, the division between those for and against
urban hogs also shifted, reflecting the starker partisan and ethnic
divide in the city as a whole. Tammany Democrats routinely sided
with pro-hogites while Whigs and Nativists came out against hogs
and their Irish owners.
The heated political rancor over hogs was especially evident in
1854 when the Board of Councilmen passed an ordinance prohibiting
swine below 59th Street, with a fine of two dollars per day per
swine. In a debate about improving neighborhoods and removing
piggeries, the coun-cilmen representing the affected wards were
defensive. Councilman Bryan McCahill, a Tammany Democrat of the
Nineteenth Ward, who depended on the Irish voters,
denounced those who favored such a proceeding as aristocrats,
who, when they moved into the Nineteenth Ward were so poor that
they were glad to get a residence near a pig-sty. Now, after they
had been Aldermen and Councilmen for a year of two, they had become
wealthy and their refined noses couldnt stand the smell. He claimed
that the Nineteenth was one of the most healthful wards in the
City, and that the Board had no right to drive the pigs out of his
Ward.
On the other side of the argument was Councilman John C.
Wandell, a commercial merchant representing the Twenty-Second Ward,
who saw the pigsties as nuisances: The Twenty-second Ward was
improving rapidly, and the people there wished to make it a
pleasant residence for those doing business down town. Real estate
values were a prime factor in both McCahills and Wandells
arguments. As the uptown neighborhoods around Central Park were
rising in value, the piggeries were becoming more of an issue.
After an hour of fighting, the Council decided to remove the pigs.
The ordinance seems to have been barely enforced, however, likely
due to a combination of poor funding and pressure from Democratic
aldermen who counted piggery own-ers among their
constituents.82
In 1859, when Daniel Delavan took office as city inspector, he
took direct measures to trans-form the northern wards. He initiated
a resolution to ban piggeries, bone boiling, and offal boil-ing
south of 86th Street. As soon as the Commissioners of Health
approved the resolution, the
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650 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
Piggery War began. Delavan seemingly ignored the political
strife that had kept previous city inspectors from acting on the
piggeries and, in the process, stirred up a hornets nest of
politi-cians who warned him to postpone action lest they lose votes
from the Irish Democrats in the upper wards. Though Delavan himself
was a Tammany Democrat, he nevertheless moved for-ward with his
agenda and began the process of full-scale hog removal.83
Delavan sent Richard Downing, superintendent of sanitary
inspection, along with fifty-seven inspectors and twenty-nine
policemen on a tour of Hogtown. They visited each piggery, ready to
confront the notoriously vicious guard dogs and their potentially
riotous owners. Instead, they were met mainly by a good deal of
loud talk and grumbling . . . accompanied by the deepest bass
grunting of the hogs.84 Perhaps the owners saw their removal as
imminent or maybe the gang of armed police and inspectors had
sufficiently intimidated them. Downing and his men gave the owners
three days notice to get rid of their hogs and remove the
associated structures (cauldrons, pens, sheds, etc.) before they
would return to tear everything down and drive the hogs to the
pound. The piggery owners had to act quickly to either relocate
their animals or sell them to a butcher.
When the police and health inspectors returned, they came armed
with guns, clubs, pickaxes, and crowbars (Figure 2). While
residents did what they could to hide the remaining hogssometimes
concealing them under beds and linensthe police were persistent and
successful. Hogs were driven to the pounds, pens torn down,
cauldrons carted off, and the property covered in lime to purify
the area of its pestiferous qualities.85
The newspapers used war metaphors excessively, describing the
police and sanitary officers as an army of expulsion and their
opponents as members of the pork army. They even drew parallels to
the recent Crimean War in Europe. With public health arguments on
their side and a veritable army of professional police, city
officials and anti-hogites no longer felt it necessary to debate
whether hogs were a nuisance or a public good. The issue seemed
much more black and white since lives were at stake. Journalists
portrayed the piggery closures as a battle for the
Figure 2. While the city inspector and police considered the
Piggery War to be a success, the process of rounding up the hogs
was anything but easy.Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, August
13, 1859.
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McNeur 651
protection of the citys health and prosperity. In almost every
article, authors described the Piggery War in triumphant terms. The
police and health inspectors were equated with war heroes, while
the piggery owners were described as backwards, stubborn, and
defiant.86 Ironically, it was a war with little violence at
all.
Perhaps one of the most defiant members of the pork army was
James McCormick, an assistant foreman of a local fire company, who
was seen as a leader in the area. He was ridiculed by the New York
Times as the king of the offal-boilers and by the New-York Herald
as Gen. McCormick, of the pork gentry.87 McCormick threatened the
police and inspectors, claiming that he would shoot any man who
laid a hand on his property. In the end, though, McCormick removed
his hogs and dismantled his pens and sheds before the police had
their chance. Instead of fighting the city for his right to keep
the animals, it was reported that McCormick, like many of his
neighbors, planned to move his business to New Jersey.88 McCormick
likely continued to supply New Yorks cheap meat market with pork
and ham, just with greater transportation costs.
By September, the Piggery War was mainly over. Delavan declared
that they had removed nine thousand hogs, demolished three thousand
pens, and confiscated one hundred boilers. While a good number of
those hogs were driven to the pound, most were removed by their
owners, such as James McCormick, to New Jersey, Westchester, and
Brooklyn. The transplantations only increased problems in these
areas where local governments struggled to control their own
live-stock populations. Hogs brought controversy wherever they
roamed.89
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Eighth Ward, where
Henry Bourden and his neighbors had fought tooth and nail to keep
their hogs in 1825, was nearly devoid of these crea-tures. The only
exceptions were the occasional herd ushered from the docks to
slaughterhouses or the clandestine hog stowed in someones apartment
or basement.90 While a handful of pigger-ies would return to the
upper reaches of the city under Mayor Fernando Woods sympathetic
administration, their stay was brief.91 For the most part, hogs
were no longer a visible presence in Manhattan. The anti-hogites
had won.
Hogs had filled an important role in New York ecologically and
economically. For a time they kept garbage heaps somewhat under
control by devouring what they could in areas often neglected by
sweepers. Following the Piggery War, city officials realized the
enormous role pigs had played in waste removal when they found
themselves struggling to find a place to dump the countless tons of
offal that the hogs had once consumed.92 Hogs also helped to keep
their owners off the welfare rolls while they struggled with low
wages and irregular work in the developing market economy.
The hog controversies exposed a politically active city with
growing class tensions. When African American suffrage was limited
in 1821 and many pro-hogites consequently lost their ability to
effectively petition the Common Council, they took to the streets
and fought for their right to use public space. New Yorkers, rich
and poor alike, actively pressured the city to protect their
interests using whatever means they had available. Swine remained
on the streets as long as they did not just because the city
government was incapable of enforcing its laws, but also because
they were at the center of a dynamic political debate between New
Yorkers.
New Yorks filthy streets had cultivated an informal economy and
a fertile environment for roaming creatures, and during the first
half of the nineteenth century, the municipal govern-ments
inability to effect long-lasting change made it possible for the
New Yorkers and their animals to continue using the streets as they
had before. Despite the anti-hogites litany of argu-ments in
petitions and newspapers, their ultimate success came because of
factors beyond their control. Cholera outbreaks and the panicked
efforts to reform the city in order to prevent similar crises
eventually trumped the protests of pro-hogites and led to the hogs
expulsion from the city. Left in their wake was a city transformed
with a new set of rules for using public space.
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652 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
The fights that raged over swine in nineteenth-century New York
shaped the landscape of the city. A hog-free New York was marked by
parks and promenades, including the celebrated Central Park that
was cleared of the piggeries that once occupied its southern end.
Olmsted and the Central Park Board of Commissioners quickly passed
a set of ordinances banning all live-stock from entering the park
and erected two pounds to hold errant animals, whether they were
hogs, cattle, goats, or geese.93 Central Park and other public
spaces throughout the city were intended for refinement, not for
unapproved foraging and grazing. These places were better
con-trolled but the battles over their use were far from over. New
Yorkers would continue to push the limits and shape the rules
governing their public spaces. The controversies over hogs were
part of a much longer struggle.94
Nineteenth-century cities, such as New York, wrestled with how
to manage public space dur-ing a time of rapid population growth.
These were landscapes where the boundaries between urban and rural
blurred, and conflicts, such as those over hogs, helped to
determine where these lines would be drawn. Cities were and
continue to be hybrid spaces, and what it means to be urban is
therefore constantly shifting. It is in these contentious moments
when decisions are made to incorporate or exclude that the city is
ultimately defined.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub-lication of this
article.
Funding
The author received financial support for the research of this
article from the Howard R. Lamar Center for the study of Frontiers
and Borders, the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University,
and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Notes
1. After the city began enforcing the hog law in the summer of
1821, they faced immediate resistance when the catchers went to
work. By the summer of 1822 most of the outer wards were exempt
from the hog law due to the actions of hog owners and the
compromises made by their Aldermen. Hogs in the Streets, New-York
Evening Post, June 12, 1821; Extract from the Report, New-York
Evening Post, July 12, 1821; Minutes of the Common Council of the
City of New York, 1784-1831 (New York: Published by the City of New
York, 1917), July 21, 1821, 11:722; Hogs Running at Large in the
Streets, New-York Evening Post, August 7, 1821; Police, New-York
Spectator, August 7, 1821; Minutes of the Common Council, June 10
1822, 12:430; Minutes of the Common Council, June 24, 1822, 12:447;
Minutes of the Common Council, July 8, 1822, 12:460-61.
2. Abner Curtis was appointed register and collector of dogs in
1811 and remained in that position for seven years. During his
first year on the job, Curtis witnessed the first dogcart riot in
1811. Another dogcart riot occurred in 1818, following the end of
his term. With the threat of rabies very real, dogs were another
urban animal considered a nuisance when running loose. Paul A.
Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City,
1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987),
224-27.
3. Quotes from Hog Law, New York Spectator, April 8, 1825.
Regarding Henry Bourdens role in the riot: Court of Sessions,
Weekly Commercial Advertiser, April 19, 1825; People vs. Henry
Bourden, New York City Court of General Sessions Records, New York
Municipal Archives, Roll 11. Henry Bourden is likely the Henry
Borden listed in the 1830 and 1840 U.S. censuses, living in the
Eighth Ward. 1830 United States Federal Census, New York Ward 8,
New York County, New York, Roll 97, 273; 1840 United States Federal
Census, New York Ward 8, New York County, New York, Roll 302,
334.
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4. Hog Law, New York Spectator; Minutes of the Common Council,
March 14, 1825, 14:365; Minutes of the Common Council, March 28,
1825, 14:410-11.
5. New Yorks hogs have been the subject of a handful of articles
and chapters. In The Road to Mobocracy, Paul Gilje places the hog
riots of the 1820s and 1830s in the context of a string of popular
riots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and argues that
the battles over hogs show a growing divide between lower-class
needs and middle-class sensibilities. Hendrik Hartog uses the
prosecution of a hog owner to show the ways municipal powers and
legal arguments were transforming during this period in both Public
Property and Private Power and Pigs and Positivism. In A Delicate
Balance Howard Rock shows how artisans used hogs as part of a
larger informal economy to make ends meet during tough economic
times. Finally, John Duffy repeatedly reminds readers how hogs were
a constant pres-ence in the antebellum city and a reminder to
residents and historians of how inadequately New York dealt with
public health issues. This article builds on the work of these
historians to reveal how these political, economic, and public
health struggles came together to shape public space and the urban
environment. Through this it is possible to understand more about
how public space was used and ulti-mately controlled. Paul Gilje,
Road to Mobocracy; Hendrik Hartog, Pigs and Positivism, Wisconsin
Law Review (July/August 1985): 899-934; Hendrik Hartog, Public
Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York
in American Law, 1730-1870, Studies in Legal History (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 139-42; Howard B. Rock,
A Delicate Balance: The Mechanics and the City, The New-York
Historical Quarterly 63 (April 1979) 93-114; John Duffy, A History
of Public Health in New York City, 1625-1866 (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1968).
6. Anti-hogite and pro-hogite are terms that I have coined as
shorthand for these two competing interests. 7. Lewis Mumford, The
Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938),
252. 8. Urban environmental historians increasingly are challenging
the idea that cities are exclusively social
artifacts. Authors such as Ari Kelman, Matthew Klingle, and
Michael Rawson, among others, have written about cities in ways
that challenge the nature/culture dichotomy and invite readers to
consider the presence and influence of nature on cities as well as
the reverse. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of
Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of
Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Michael Rawson,
Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010). See also Christine Meisner Rosen and Joel
Arthur Tarr, The Importance of an Urban Perspec-tive in
Environmental History Journal of Urban History 20 (May 1994):
299-310.
9. For the Dutch, see I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of
Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 (New York: R. H. Dodd, 1915-1928),
March 15, 1640, 4:92; June 27, 1650, 4:121; November 15, 1651,
4:124-25; July 28, 1653, 4:140; November 15, 1651, 4:24-125; Duffy,
A History of Public Health, 11-2. For the English, see Minutes of
the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675-1776 (New York:
Dodd Mead & Company, 1905), March 23, 1703, 2:258; July 20,
1708, 2:358; October 14, 1758, 6:152; November 22, 1770, 7:244.
Virginia Anderson looks at the havoc hogs and other livestock
wreaked in the British colonies of New England, though she does not
dwell too much on urban animal issues. Virginia DeJohn Anderson,
Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
10. Jane Allen, Population, in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The
Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995), 920-24; The People vs. Isaac Baptiste, New-York Daily
Advertiser, August 16, 1820; Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of
an Octogenarian (1816-1860) (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1896), 86.
11. Rock, A Delicate Balance, 134; Sean Wilentz, Chants
Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working
Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Seth
Rockman looks at a similar transition in early republican
Baltimore. Seth Rockman, Scraping by: Wage Labor, Slavery, and
Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press 2009).
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654 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
12. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund
Burke, a conservative Whig politician in Britain, referred to the
French masses as the swinish multitude when he warned readers of
the perils of allowing the lower classes to gain political power.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York,
Penguin Classics, 1982). The phrase was consequently picked up by
critics and reappropriated by laborers and radical writers. Its
notoriety made it a well-known phrase in antebellum America and
elsewhere. Surely the New York writers reveled in the way they were
able to apply it to their particular situation.
13. For more on the ways hogs have been used symbolically in
politics and writing, see Carl Fisher, Politics and Porcine
Representation: Multitudinous Swine in the British Eighteenth
Century, LIT 10 (2000): 303-26; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1986), 45-59, 147-48; Brett Mizelle, I Have
Brought My Pig to a Fine Market, in Scott C. Martin, ed., Cultural
Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789-1860 (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 184; Robert Malcolmson
and Stephanos Mastoris, The Eng-lish Pig: A History (London: The
Hambledon Press, 1998), 1-28.
14. Address of the Swine, New-York Evening Post, February 21,
1818.15. Charles Henry Wilson, The Wanderer in America, or Truth at
Home (Thirsk, England: Henry Masterman,
1824), 18-9. Many American cities, such as Philadelphia,
Washington, DC, and Baltimore, as well as many smaller cities, had
roaming hog populations. One traveler, who referred to hogs as
Americas favorite pet, declared that he had not yet found any city,
county or town where [he had] not seen these lovable animals
wandering about peacefully in huge herds. Ole Munch Raeder,
Correspondent from the Homeland, in Oscar Handlin, ed., This Was
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 217. See
also Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, Travels in the United States,
Etc. During 1849 and 1850 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851),
May 16, 1849, 13. Ironically, despite these trav-elers claims that
hogs were a unique problem to New York or the United States, many
Europeans cities also struggled with their own roaming hogs, though
to a lesser extent. Malcolmson and Mastoris, The English Pig,
40-4.
16. New York City Common Council Papers, 1670-1831, City
Inspector Petitions, Municipal Archives Collections, Roll 65,
1818.
17. Horses make an interesting comparison to hogs, as they were
equally, if not more, present on the streets of the city, yet they
rarely got the kind of negative attention that hogs received until
much later in the century when they were being replaced by
automobiles. Not only were regal horses a status symbol for
wealthier New Yorkers, they were considered living machines, as
Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have termed them, and useful for rich
and poor alike. They were much less divisive than hogs. Examples of
authors complaining about the disgrace brought on by hogs include:
Hogs in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, April 27, 1819; Swine,
New-York Evening Post, November 3, 1819. On the role of horses in
the urban landscape: Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in
the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Ann Norton Greene, Horses at
Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008); Clay McShane, Gelded Age Boston,
New England Quarterly 74 (August 2001): 274-302.
18. For more on the middle-class and wealthy American quest for
refinement, see Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America:
Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993). There are many
compari-sons to be drawn between the way anti-hogites perceived
lower-class New Yorkers as wrongly imposing on public spaces and
the way conservationists saw locals as desecrating the National
Parks in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. See Karl
Jacoby, Crimes against Nature (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia
Press, 2003); Louis S. Warren, Hunters Game (Cambridge, MA: Yale
University Press, 1999); Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness
(Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); and Mark
David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001).
19. See Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 44-71; Wilentz, Chants
Democratic.
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McNeur 655
20. Until 1821 the Common Council controlled the cost and weight
of bread sold within the city limits with a bread assize.
Politically volatile, the debate over the bread assize lasted for
over two decades and led to bakers strikes and many disputes. The
prices of other provisions not traditionally controlled by the city
continued to rise and fall, but mostly rise, making it difficult
for many of New Yorks destitute to purchase much at all. What E. P.
Thompson and other historians have called the moral economy was
gradually disappearing and the poor had to devise new ways to deal
with erratic pricing of basic needs. New York (N.Y.) Common
Council, Laws and Ordinances Ordained and Established by the Mayor,
Aldermen, and Commonalty of the City of New-York, in Common Council
Convened (New York, T & J. Swords, 1817), 51-6; Assize of
Bread, New-York Herald, March 15, 1815; The Poor . . . New-York
Herald, March 18, 1815; Bread, New-York Evening Post, for the
Country, March 5, 1822; Rise of Milk, New-York Herald, November 30,
1816; Milk, New-York Herald, December 7, 1816; Soup House in
Frankfort-Street, near the Arsenal, New-York Herald, February 19,
1817; Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New
York, Plain Directions on Domestic Economy (New York: Printed by
Samuel Wood & Sons, 1821).
21. Raymond Mohl in Poverty in New York, 1783-1825 deems this
first quarter of the nineteenth century to be a transition period
for American cities. The city was growing and its prosperity
increasing, but the municipal services were not developing at the
same rate. The city corporation which served the compact, stable
community of the eighteenth century no longer met the needs of many
thousands of immigrant and native newcomers spread over a more
expansive urban community. These services expanded in a haphazard
fashion, in response to emergencies and immediate pressures. Peter
Gluck and Richard Meister accentuate that the growth that occurred
after the Revolution due to an increase in life span, fertility,
and immigration resulted in a certain level of instability that the
government agencies had to account for when developing institutions
and defining their role. At the same time, this period saw a
growing division between what was urban and rural, physically,
economically, and culturally. Complementing these studies, Seth
Rockman tracks the controversy over urban welfare systems and the
important yet insufficient role they played as a safety net for
laborers in Baltimore during the early Republic. See Mohl, Poverty
in New York, 3-13; Peter R. Gluck and Richard J. Meister, Cities in
Transi-tion: Social Changes and Institutional Responses in Urban
Development (New York: New Viewpoints, 1979), 3-9, 36-43; Rockman,
Scraping by.
22. Remonstrances against Law to Prohibit Swine from Running at
Large, New York City Common Council Papers, Municipal Archives, Box
60V, Folder #497 Flat, May 19, 1817.
23. It is difficult to determine how New Yorkers were able to
identify their own hogs based on available records. Unlike in
cities or towns where hogs were legal, there do not seem to be any
ear mark registers associating owners with specific symbols
imprinted on their animals ear. The behavior of hogs going home at
night is recounted by Charles Dickens in the 1840s. Charles
Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, in Park Benjamin,
ed., The New World (New York: J. Winchester, 1842).
24. Remonstrances against Law to Prohibit Swine from Running at
Large; The Petition of the Sub-scribers Inhabitants of the City of
New York, New York City Common Council Papers, 1670-1831, February
2, 1818, Roll 67.
25. To the Mayor and Corporation of the City of New-York,
Republican Watch-Tower, June 13, 1809, 3.26. For the Public
Advertiser, Dirty Streets, No. 1, Public Advertiser, April 11,
1810, 2. For an overview
of urban American sanitation, see Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in
the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880-1980 (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), 13-20.
27. Minutes of the Common Council, May 18 ,1812, 7:146-47; see
also, Minutes of the Common Council, November 14, 1814, 8:84
28. See, for instance, Minutes of the Common Council, June 1,
1818, 9:668; Communication, New-York Evening Post, June 29,
1819.
29. New York, May 15, 1799, Daily Advertiser, May 15, 1799;
Correspondence between Peter Burtsell and John Pintard, Inspector
of Health, January 20, 1806. New York City Common Council Papers,
1670-1831,
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656 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
Roll 29; Minutes of the Common Council, May 28, 1810, 6:209;
Public Health, New-York Evening Post, August 12, 1825; Cholera
Statistics, New York Mercury, August 15, 1832; City Intelligence,
New York Herald, May 18, 1849; Isaac Candler, A Summary View of
America: Comprising a Description of the Face of the Country, and
of Several of the Principal Cities (London: T. Cadell, 1824),
22-4.
30. Quote of Ole Munch Raeder, a Norwegian lawyer who lived in
New York in 1847. Ole Munch Raeder, Correspondent from the
Homeland, 217; Health of the City, New-York Daily Advertiser,
October 29, 1819.
31. Griskin is the lean part of a hogs loin. The Swinish
Multitude, New-York Evening Post, October 10, 1816.32. For examples
of boys riding hogs and getting into trouble, see The People v.
Christian Harriet,
in D. Bacon, ed., The New-York Judicial Repository (New York:
Gould and Banks, 1818), 262-63; Swine, New-York Evening Post, March
17, 1818; More Serious Accidents from Hogs, New-York Evening Post,
October 29, 1818. For descriptions of victimized women and girls,
see A Congratulation, New-York Evening Post, December 31, 1817; The
People v. Christian Harriet, in The New-York Judi-cial Repository,
262; Communication, New-York Evening Post, June 26, 1819; New-York
May 28, 1810, The New-York Evening Post, May 29, 1810; To the
Editor of the Evening Post, The New-York Evening Post, June 28,
1819; Yesterday Afternoon, New-York Columbian, July 1, 1820.
33. Mr Stone, Northern Whig, August 1, 1815.34. For more on
women and household economy, see Jeanne Boydston, Home & Work:
Housework, Wages,
and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990); Rockman, Scraping by, 158-93;
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York,
1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
35. Allen, Population; Charles Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown:
An Illustrated History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976),
50-71.
36. The Common Council had been debating the wording of a new
law respecting free-roaming swine in the months before Hammonds
petition, but progress came to a standstill on October 21, 1816,
when it was laid on the table. Hammonds petition may have been an
attempt to break the deadlock and get the ordinance passed. Minutes
of the Common Council, November 5, 1816, 8:670; May 17, 1817,
9:130. The archivist at the Municipal Archives of New York was not
able to locate the original petition. Rock makes reference to the
fact that the petition was signed by about two hundred names in A
Delicate Balance.
37. The Swinish Multitude, Evening Post, May 26, 1817. This
article traces the history of the proposed hog laws from 1816
through May 1817, accounting for the possible reasons for its
delay. The Common Councils motives for tabling the ordinance are
not mentioned in their minutes. Minutes of the Common Council, May
17, 1817, 9:130.
38. Remonstrances against Law to Prohibit Swine from Running at
Large.39. The Swinish Multitude, New-York Evening Post, May 26,
1817.40. Common Council, New-York Evening Post, May 21, 1817;
Howard Rock and Paul Gilje, Sweep
O! Sweep O! African American Chimney Sweeps and Citizenship in
the New Nation, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser. 51 (July
1994): 507-38. For more on the free blacks of New York City, see
Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New
York City, 1770-1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991);
and Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans
in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003). Approximately half of the petition signers were African
American, based on New York State census records: Alice Eicholz and
James M. Rose, eds., Free Black Heads of Households in the New York
State Federal Census, 1790-1830 (Detroit: Gale Research Co.,
1981).
41. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 116-18; Leonard P. Curry,
The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of a Dream
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 88, 217-18.
42. Humor remained an important way for the anti-hogites to
address what they saw as an embarrassment to the city. It served as
an entertaining and artful means for criticizing the city while
also wooing poten-tial anti-hogites. The Hogs and the Corporation,
New-York Evening Post, May 27, 1817; The Hogs and the Corporation,
New-York Herald, May 28, 1817.
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43. Minutes of the Common Council, June 23, 1817, 9:215-16;
Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 225.44. Quadroped Toleration,
Intolerable, New-York Columbian, July 23, 1817; The Yankee in
New-York,
Exile, July 26, 1817; Dogs and Hogs, Albany Argus, August 22,
1817; Communication, New-York Evening Post, September 13, 1817; For
the New-York Evening Post, New-York Evening Post, September 3,
1817; Minutes of the Common Council, October 7, 1817, 9:310; Swine,
New-York Herald, October 11, 1817; A Congratulation, New-York
Evening Post, December 31, 1817; A Law Respecting Swine, New-York
Columbian, January 15, 1818, 9:3.
45. Minutes of the Common Council, December 15, 1817, 9:393.46.
Repeal of the Law Prohibiting Swine Running at Large, New-York
Evening Post, December 29, 1817.47. The Petition of the Subscribers
Inhabitants of the City of New York, New York City Common
Council
Papers, 1670-1831, February 2, 1818, Roll 67. The race of the
signers was determined by checking them against New York State
census records: Eicholz and Rose, Free Black Heads of
Households.
48. Minutes of the Common Council, February 2, 1818, 9:462.49.
Hogs, New-York Evening Post, February 16, 1818. Anger at the repeal
can also be seen here: Repeal
of the Swine Law, New-York Columbian, February 10, 1818; Swine
Once More, New-York Evening Post, February 21, 1818.
50. Swine Once More, The New-York Evening Post.51. Information
about the party affiliation of the aldermen can be found in D. T.
Valentine, Manual of the
Corporation of the City of New York for 1854 (New York: McSpedon
and Baker, Printers, 1854).52. Mayors during this period served as
judge of the Court of General Sessions as part of their position
as
mayor. Correspondent, New-York Evening Post, December 7, 1818;
New-York Judicial Repository, 258-59.
53. William J. Novak, The Peoples Welfare: Law and Regulation in
Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1996), 60-71, 191-233. In addition, nuisance law
and its use in the judicial system is discussed in Melosi, The
Sanitary City, 21-2.
54. New-York Judicial Repository, 264, 269. For a more detailed
analysis of this case from a legal historians perspective, see
Hartog, Pigs and Positivism; Hartog, Public Property and Private
Power, 139-42.
55. One other such case includes the indictment of Isaac
Baptiste, following the complaint of a grocer who had a run-in with
Baptistes hogs. The article discussing this case makes reference to
the fact that at least twenty such cases had been heard prior, all
ruling hogs to be a nuisance. The People vs. Isaac Baptiste,
New-York Daily Advertiser, August 16, 1820.
56. Hogs Running at Large in the City, New-York Evening Post,
July 1, 1819; Hogs, New-York Daily Advertiser, April 7, 1819; Hogs
Avaunt! New-York Columbian, January 7, 1819; Hogs in the Streets,
New-York Evening Post, April 27, 1819; The People vs. Isaac
Baptiste, New-York Daily Advertiser.
57. Salutary Conviction, New-York Evening Post, June 9, 1820.58.
Minutes of the Common Council, April 30, 1821, 11:600; Proceedings
of the Common Council, New-York
Evening Post, May 1, 1821. Permission from the state legislature
to seize privately owned pigs for the Almshouse was requested on
January 8, 1821: Minutes of the Common Council, January 8, 1821,
11:444. The law was passed on April 30, 1821, and reported in the
newspapers immediately following: Minutes of the Common Council,
April 30, 1821, 11:600; Proceedings of the Common Council, New-York
Evening Post, May 1, 1821.
59. The Law Respecting the Running of Swine, New-York Spectator,
June 1, 1821; Hogs in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, June 12,
1821. Issues with the enforcement of laws were typical during this
period and complaints frequent in the newspaper. The problems
stemmed from a combination of insuf-ficient funding, lack of
municipal services, and poor organization of the police force.
60. Minutes of the Common Council, June 25, 1821, 11:704.61.
Minutes of the Common Council, July 21, 1821, 11:722.
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658 Journal of Urban History 37(5)
62. Hogs Running at Large in the Streets, New-York Evening Post,
August 4, 1821; Police, New-York Spectator, August 7, 1821; From
the Daily Advertiser, New-York Evening Post, August 4, 1821.
63. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 133. Harris argues that it
was at this point that a division grew between middle-class and
working-class blacks over acceptable means for political activism.
In Road to Mobocracy, Gilje contextualizes these hog riots as being
part of a larger set of public demonstrations in nineteenth-century
New York. He attributes the growing violence of riots in the 1820s
and 1830s to the increasing economic disparity and transforming
ideas of public good. Perhaps restriction of suffrage rights also
impacted the changing tenor of these events.
64. New-York Spectator, August 7, 1821.65. In Proceedings of the
Corporation . . . , New-York Evening Post, for the Country, April
5, 1822.66. Cleanliness, New-York Evening Post, for the Country,
July 15, 1823.67. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 130;
People vs. Henry Bourden, New York City Court of
General Sessions Records (NYCCGSR), Municipal Archives
Collections, April 9, 1825, roll 11; People vs. Allaire &
Allaire, NYCCGSR, April 9, 1825, roll 11; People vs. Thompson and
Phalen, NYCCGSR, April 11, 1825, roll 11.
68. Thomas F. DeVoe, The Market Book: Containing a Historical
Account of the Public Markets in the Cities of New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, and Boston (1862; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969),
482-83.
69. If the Laws . . . , New-York Evening Post, September 8,
1826; Hog Law, New-York Evening Post, September 8, 1826; Where Is
the Hog Cart? New-York Evening Post, February 27, 1827; DeVoe, The
Mar-ket Book, 482-83; New-York Evening Post, July 2, 1830, quoted
in Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 5:1693; Gilje, Road
to Mobocracy, 231; Hog Thieves, New-York Evening Post, February 20,
1829.
70. Communication, New York Mercury, August 1, 1832. The New
York State census for 1835 put the hog population of New York
County at 11,903 and the 1845 census logs 8,591. The numbers have
decreased significantly since the estimate of twenty thousand in
1820. Of course, it is difficult to trust these censuses wholly, as
most New Yorkers were breaking laws by keeping hogs on the streets
and likely not eager to admit their holdings to the census takers.
It is possible that the census takers were counting the hogs kept
legally in pens. Even if that is the case, the number of complaints
about hogs in the newspapers and city documents declined
significantly during this period, likely reflecting a diminishing
number on the street. New York State, Census of the State of New
York, for 1835 (Albany: Printed by Croswell, Van Benthuysen &
Burt, 1836); New York State, Census of the State of New York, for
1845 (Albany: Carroll & Cook, 1846).
71. Some of the more famous tourists who mocked New Yorks hog
problem during this period include Charles Dickens and Henry David
Thoreau. Dickens, American Notes; Henry David Thoreau, in Walter
Harding and Carl Bode, eds., The Correspondence of Henry David
Thoreau (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 112.
72. New York (N.Y.) Board of Health, Minutes, 1798-1896,
[microform]. NYC Municipal Archives. Roll 7, May 17, 1849.
73. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the
People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1992), 62. For more discussion of uptown swine, see Charles
E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849,
and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 113; New
York by Sun-LightThermometer 90 in the Shade, New York Herald, July
12, 1849; Twelfth-WardCholera Incitements, New-York Daily Tribune,
August 6, 1849; The Cholera Report of Last Week, New York Herald,
August 6, 1849; Health of the CityThe Cholera Report of Last Week,
New York Herald, August 13, 1849.
74. The Cholera in Orange-St., New-York Tribune, May 18, 1849;
The Epidemic, New-York Tribune, May 19, 1849; The Cholera, New-York
Tribune, May 21, 1849; City Intelligence, New York Herald, May 18,
1849; Our Cholera Sermon, New-York Daily Tribune, August 3, 1849;
Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 105-06.
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75. Those in the medical profession argued over whether
quarantines or sanitary solutions were best for preventing
epidemics such as cholera. More on these debates can be found in
Rosenberg, The Cholera Years; and Duffy, A History of Public
Health.
76. Practical Lesson in Politics, New-York Daily Tribune, August
21, 1845; Board of Aldermen, New-York Daily Tribune, June 22, 1847;
The Cholera Report of Last Week, New York Herald, August 6, 1849;
Health of the CityThe Cholera Report of Last Week, New York Herald,
August 13, 1849; EmigrationPublic Health, New York Herald, April
29, 1850.
77. Helen Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in
Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003).
78. The Bone Boiling Establishments of New York, New York
Herald, July 20, 1859.79. Frederick Law Olmsted, Passages in the
Life of an Unpractical Man, in Charles E. Beveridge and
David Schuller, eds., The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Vol.
III Creating Central Park, 1857-1861 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983), 84-94. Hogtown was just south of Seneca
Vil-lage, which was mostly populated by free African Americans. The
Present Look of our Great Central Park, New York Times, July 9,
1856; Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 59-91.
80. Practical Lesson in Politics, New-York Daily Tribune, August
21, 1845; Results of the War upon the Piggeries, New York Times,
September 20, 1859.
81. Metropolitan Nuisances, New York Times, June 5, 1858.82.
Common Council Proceedings, New York Times, July 3, 1854; Common
Council Proceedings,
New York Times, August 11, 1854; Municipal, New York Times,
November 27, 1855. The city was paying for Central Park through
special assessments made on the property surrounding the park that
stood to gain in value. Real estate values and nuisances that could
bring them down were therefore a big issue for those bearing the
cost of this public works project. Robin Einhorn discusses a
similar political situation in Property Rules. Robin Einhorn,
Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
83. Affairs of the City Inspectors Office, New York Times, July
7, 1859; News of the Day, New York Times, July 7, 1859; The Bone
Boiling Establishments of New York, New York Herald, July 20, 1859.
City Intelligence, New York Herald, July 26, 1859.
84. Further Particulars of the Hogtown War, New York Herald,
July 29, 1859; The Storming of Hogtown, New York Herald, July 27,
1859; City Intelligence, New York Times, July 7, 1859.
85. The Storming of Hogtown, New York Herald.86. The Offal and
Piggery Nuisances, New York Times, July 27, 1859; The Storming of
Hogtown,
New York Herald; The News, New York Herald, July 27, 1859;
Another Raid upon the Piggeries, New York Times, August 9, 1859;
The Public Health, New York Herald, August 13, 1859.
87. The Offal and Piggery Nuisances, New York Times; Further
Particulars of the Hogtown War, New York Herald, July 29, 1859.
88. City Intelligence, New York Times, July 28, 1859.89. Removal
of the Up Town Piggeries, New York Herald, September 5, 1859;
Condition of the Streets
The Right Men for the Right Places, New York Herald, August 16,
1859; Down with the New York Piggeries in Our CityLet Inspector
Delavan Keep His Hogs at Home, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 9,
1859; The News, New York Herald, August 15, 1859.
90. Pigs remained on the minds of the citys lawmakers when the
first Tenement House Act was passed in 1867, forbidding any horse,
cow, calf, swine, pig, sheep or goat from being kept in a tenement
or lodging-house, or, in other words, a poor mans residence. Robert
W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem:
Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House
Com-mission (New York: Macmillan & Co, 1903), 308.
91. General City News, New York T